More affordable, accelerated, simplified: Microsoft Teams Phone now makes it possible to reach Hannover Re employees worldwide

The challenge: Communication without digital collaboration channels

Hannover Re is one of the world’s leading reinsurers. It operates all lines of property, casualty, life, and health reinsurance and has a global presence with more than 3,500 employees. Collaboration and communication across all locations and with customers from all countries is crucial here: customers with an international presence need to be looked after at different locations at the same time.

“We used to have 4,000 stationary and mobile telephony devices, and we used a separate solution for virtual meetings. What we didn’t have was any way to collaborate digitally and efficiently,” says Jan-Niklas Schilling, System Engineer at Hannover Re. For example, Hannover Re employees couldn’t work directly with each other on projects: file storage, meetings, and telephony were spread across different systems, which didn’t support uniform operation. “Collaboration happened almost exclusively over email: you prepared documents and then sent them to your colleagues,” Schilling says. This process was cumbersome, time-consuming, and simply outdated for a modern company like Hannover Re. The reinsurance company thus set out to find a solution that would take communication and collaboration to the next level—and had the potential to replace existing hardware.

One huge advantage was that the Office solutions from Microsoft, such as OneDrive, Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, were already in use throughout the company. “What we were missing was a link, a standardized platform, that could be used to communicate as well as work together on projects,” Schilling says. “As a well-known part of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Teams was an obvious choice here. So apart from the time for the test phase, we didn’t have to invest anything extra.” It was settled: Hannover Re launched a pilot project with Microsoft Teams as its communication and collaboration platform. “The pilot was a complete success. We clarified the data protection and compliance issues, set up multifactor authentication, and instituted conditional access guidelines—so the company-wide rollout was perfectly prepared,” Schilling says. When the coronavirus restrictions came into force unexpectedly, Hannover Re was able to roll out Microsoft Teams within a very short space of time. The company next set its sights on telephony.

The solution: Fast, affordable, and consistent communication with Teams Phone

It’s clear today that with the company-wide rollout of Teams, Hannover Re laid the foundation for purely digital and efficient communication across several countries. “We set up training sessions as live events for all our employees worldwide to take them on this journey. This increased acceptance of the solution enormously,” Schilling explains. “We had our foot in the door. Now we had to open the door further and bring our telephony up to date.”

And that’s what Hannover Re did: the aim was to replace around 4,000 analog hardware telephones worldwide. “We wanted to extend the new type of collaboration and communication to classic telephony,” Schilling says. “And that’s precisely what this Teams feature makes possible.” With Microsoft Teams Phone, employees at Hannover Re are no longer tied to stationary hardware phones—they can always receive calls via Teams, whether they’re in the office, out of the office, or on the go, and whether they’re on a computer or a smartphone. All employees still have their own phone numbers, which they can be reached at regardless of whether they’re in Germany, Australia, or wherever. “For setting up connections and allocating numbers, we rely on the Operator Connect Teams function, which is connected to NTT, our telephony provider,” Schilling explains. “Operator Connect takes over everything that would otherwise have involved work for us. All we have to do is specify how many telephone numbers we need, which people these numbers should reach, and the Hannover Re locations they’re at.” Using Operator Connect requires no additional local infrastructure, making the entire communication system even simpler. Just five locations still have an intermediate hardware component to meet local regulatory requirements, and there are only 23 telephones left at Hannover Re worldwide. “When a person gets an incoming call, it rings directly in Teams and on mobile devices at the same time. This means that the inconvenient redirection to mobile devices is a thing of the past,” Schilling says.

The new telephony solution also saves a lot of time and money when equipping new workstations, as the on- and offboarding processes are now fully automated. Thanks to the increased automation and reduced complexity, Hannover Re needs just two people to operate its global telephony. When new hires start at the company, all that’s necessary to set up a new user is to click on the “New phone number” button. The new users then automatically receive the license to use Teams Phone and the corresponding telephone number. The voicemail greeting is also automatically customized for each person using text-to-speech. “By switching to Teams Phone and Operator Connect, we’ve reduced the admin costs of setting up digital workstations for new employees to less than five euros a month, and we can complete the setup in a very short time,” Schilling says. In other words, the modern world of digital communication and collaboration is open to all Hannover Re employees worldwide right from their first day at work.