How Stad Lokeren gave citizens one number and full call visibility with ROGER365.io

About

Stad Lokeren is the city administration of Lokeren, a Belgian city of around 50,000 inhabitants. Up to a thousand people work for the city, spread across about 30 buildings, serving citizens in person, online, and by phone. At the front of it all sits the Infopunt, the city's customer contact center: a team of eight that handles reception at the city hall and the Moerbeke office, plus back-office telephony. In recent years the city council has put service and customer friendliness at the centre of its plans, which made citizen contact, and the telephony behind it, a priority.

The Challenges

Not long ago, Stad Lokeren still ran on old-fashioned phones. The Infopunt had no idea how many people were on hold, or even whether calls were being answered. Around 2021, the city moved telephony to Microsoft Teams, and its consultant recommended a contact center package to sit on top. That solution kept causing problems, though, and the team was left working around them rather than fixing them. Native Teams call handling was too limited on its own, and the workarounds were not sustainable. Meanwhile, the city council had made a clear choice to put service and customer friendliness first. That raised the stakes: waiting times had to improve, and the city wanted to replace the many different phone numbers on its website with a single main number, so a citizen always reaches someone. For the Infopunt staff, who are the first line whenever software fails, the unreliable setup was a daily source of frustration. Lokeren needed a stable, robust platform it could trust.

“Until a few years ago we worked with old-fashioned telephones, and we actually had no idea how many people were on hold, or whether calls were even being answered.” - Lorianne Dauwels, Team Leader Infopunt, Stad Lokeren

The Solution

With the council focused on better service, Lokeren set out to fix its telephony and move from many published phone numbers to one main number. After the earlier contact center tool kept forcing workarounds, the city chose the ROGER365.io Contact Center for a more stable, robust platform. It came to the decision through Hanssens, a ROGER365.io Elite Partner it had met at a sector webinar and event, and whose live demos and practical approach won the city over. The migration was a big bang, and a smooth one: the team worked on the old system until noon and reopened the phone lines on ROGER365.io at half past one the same day, helped by a test environment and clear preparation. Today Lokeren runs two queues, one for the Infopunt reception and one for the internal helpdesk, configured with Hanssens. Day to day it needs little management beyond setting the odd holiday, and a TOPdesk integration brings citizen records into the same place. Supervisors watch queues and pull reporting from Teams.

The Results

The change shows up first in visibility. Where the Infopunt once had no idea who was waiting, it now sees exactly how many callers are on hold and for how long, with supervisors and reporting built into Teams. Staff cherry-pick calls, transfer them smoothly, and pull colleagues in to help when queues build. For citizens, the switch to one main number means they always reach a person, who either answers or connects them to the right service, and callback requests have proved popular at busy moments.

The clearest business result is on the IT side: the helpdesk now sees far fewer tickets from the contact center, where the old tool produced the same complaints again and again, and staff frustration has dropped significantly. The platform needs little day-to-day management, and a TOPdesk integration is moving Lokeren towards helping citizens from A to Z in one portal. It all runs inside the Microsoft Teams environment the city already governs.

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“We see far fewer tickets coming in from our contact center at the helpdesk. With the previous partner we only got workarounds, never real solutions, so the frustration among staff has dropped significantly.” - Roel de Meyer, Frontoffice Consultant Communication Systems, Stad Lokeren

Lessons Learned

If there is one thing Lokeren would tell anyone facing the same choice, it is this: always ask for a demo. Promises on paper can look polished, but seeing the software work on your own use case is what counts, and it is what the team will insist on from now on. The other lesson is that a big-bang switch need not be scary. With a test environment to practise in and clear information up front, Lokeren moved from the old system to ROGER365.io in a single afternoon, and staff picked it up surprisingly quickly.

The Future

Lokeren wants to widen how citizens can reach it. Top of the wishlist is chat, and channels like webchat and WhatsApp that younger residents prefer, which ROGER365.io supports. The team is also watching AI closely, especially automatic transcription of citizen calls that is stored in the system, which would help when a caller is hard to follow. Closer in, Lokeren wants to extend its TOPdesk integration so staff can help a citizen from A to Z in one portal, without switching programs. Microsoft Teams stays the foundation, with omnichannel and AI added as departments are ready.