Kent County Council

The situation

Kent County Council delivers services across multiple departments, each with distinctive operating models. Customer-facing staff handle calls as part of a broader mix of responsibilities, managing cases, processing applications, responding to enquiries. The challenge is providing tools that fit this working pattern rather than imposing call centre infrastructure that assumes specialised staffing models.

When KCC migrated to Microsoft Teams, the council initially relied on the platform’s basic call queue functionality. This provided calling capability but lacked visibility. Supervisors could not see queue status or call volumes. Service levels could not be monitored. The Pensions team, which handles a high volume of inbound calls around benefit queries, particularly felt the constraints.

What SCC did

Rather than deploying a separate contact centre system, SCC integrated Luware Nimbus, a specialist contact centre platform, directly within the Microsoft Teams environment. Staff handling calls within Teams now have access to proper contact centre features. Workflows operate within the Teams interface so there is no need to switch between applications.

Supervisors can monitor call activity, track wait times, see which team members are available, and manage queues in real time.

What changed

Pensions staff can now see when calls are backing up and respond by adjusting available capacity. Call volumes are tracked so that staffing decisions can be informed by data rather than guesswork. The workflow integration means that after a call, staff can record case notes directly within Teams rather than juggling multiple applications.

What the client learned

Kent County Council learned that the success came from selecting a solution designed for hybrid work patterns rather than attempting to retrofit traditional call centre infrastructure onto a platform that was never intended for it. Fitting the tool to the working model, rather than the other way around, produced an outcome that staff adopted naturally and that delivered immediate operational benefit.