REI Co-op gets even more out of its Microsoft Teams move with Teams Phone

“We really wanted to upgrade an aging infrastructure and provide our employees with a more unified communications experience,” says Ted Fagerness, Manager for Voice and Video for IT Infrastructure Engineering at REI, when asked about the company’s move to Microsoft Teams.

Before Teams, REI ran Skype for Business, mostly for conferencing and chat. The company also ran several other systems for calling. “There was a clear opportunity to consolidate our communications services,” says Fagerness.

Most of these communication systems ran on-premises, and REI was eager to move this infrastructure to the cloud to offload some of the management expense. As Fagerness adds, “Migrating from our on-premises Skype platform to a Teams hosted solution was a big improvement from a support and management standpoint.”

Teams Phone solves technical challenges and drives new business 

With strong adoption of Teams in Islands mode, REI was ready to make the move to Teams Only mode, which helped the company migrate many employees to Teams Phone.

The company took a phased approach to the migration, starting with several groups of employees who had previously used Skype for Business calling. Along with Teams Phone, REI switched to Teams calling plans, which eliminated the time and expense of managing on-premises session border controllers and other calling infrastructure.

Teams Phone also solved an interesting call-management issue. The company had previously purchased a block of phone numbers with the same local area code. Some of the numbers were allocated to managers outside that area code. However, when managers used these numbers to recruit local employees, people would see the non-local number and sometimes not return the call.

Changing the number to a different area code with the company’s carrier was often a long, complicated process. REI had to reserve numbers, port them over to separate session initiation protocol (SIP) trunks, and more. “Changing a phone number for an employee could often take weeks. Now, with Teams and Microsoft calling plans, we can complete the same process in five minutes or less,” says Wright.

Along with standard calling configurations, REI set up multiple lines with features like auto-attendant and call queues. The company used these features to support receptionists and incorporated them into a seamless Teams experience. They also ended up supporting a whole new business unit for REI.

The new business unit focused on providing customers with guided services for adventure travel experiences. “We initially thought that we’d have to set up a whole new contact center solution to manage incoming customer calls for this business, and then we discovered that Teams could do the job just as effectively,” says Fagerness.

REI set up Teams as a kind of hybrid call center. Better yet, the system scaled effectively to meet the needs of a rapidly growing business and today supports agents in 10 different regions of the United States. As Fagerness says, “With Teams Phone, we gained the flexibility to set up an effective customer management system—at a fraction of the cost of a traditional call center platform.”

An ever-expanding use of Teams across the business 

The company completed its migration to Teams Only mode at the end of 2020 for more than 15,000 employees across its office, retail, and distribution center locations. It enabled Teams Phone for 2,500 of those employees as well. And the use of Teams continues to expand at REI.

While most office employees continue to work effectively from home, REI is gradually creating new physical satellite offices for employee hybrid-work situations. REI has implemented conference rooms with Teams Rooms systems, including Crestron units and Microsoft Surface Hub. Similar technology updates are planned for other conference rooms across REI.

To support the new equipment, and in keeping with its strategy to streamline management of its unified communications infrastructure, REI decided to go with a managed service. After looking at several options, the company chose Teams Rooms managed services—a cloud-based IT management and monitoring service for Teams Rooms devices and peripherals. 

“We concluded that the Teams Rooms managed services were definitely the best fit for REI’s technology support team given the large number of conference rooms we have across the network, and continue to deploy,” says Fagerness.

Along with new conference room technology, REI introduced “bookable workspaces” (as opposed to dedicated physical desks across its offices). This, in turn, will drive even more deployment of Teams Phone as the flexibility of softphones replace older, physical phones. Again, delivering a unified Teams experience will drive the transition.

As Fagerness says, “Our goal is to continue to improve the user experience, so we enable people to work almost entirely within Teams without having to bounce back and forth between different applications.” 

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