Microsoft's Contact Center Evolution with Peter Ruiter

Mark Smith: 0:19
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from the Netherlands. He works at Capgemini as a principal solution architect and cloud domain lead. He was first awarded as MVP in 2024. In his free time you can find him tinkering with new technologies or spending time with his family. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Peter.

Peter Ruiter: 1:07
Thanks. It's great to be here, Mark, thanks.

Mark Smith: 1:10
Good to have you on and good to hear your story, and I always like to start with food family and fun.

Peter Ruiter: 1:22
What do they mean to you? Obviously, family is a key part of it, based on the introduction, but tell me more. Yeah, yeah, my family. I got two kids. I got two boys, 14 and 10. I got a wife that is from Argentine origin. Well, she grew up in America. We met, actually, at a Microsoft conference at the previous Ignite in Orlando while she was just living there. We met up in Disney Springs. She's not a tech nerd, as I am, but yeah, that's how life goes. And now we're in the Netherlands. She made the big jump to here and is constantly complaining about the horrible gray weather. So in the end, we plan on living in Florida, where it's a little bit warmer than here, but for now, the kids are still.

Mark Smith: 2:09
Where are you?

Peter Ruiter: 2:10
going to live to Florida. She has. Yeah, yeah, yeah, so that's. The weather is much, much better than here.

Mark Smith: 2:18
Quite different. It's a 10-year plan.

Peter Ruiter: 2:20
It's not next year, but it's a 10-year plan. Yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 2:24
I like it, I like it, I like it. And so then, what do you do for food Like what's the best food in the Netherlands?

Peter Ruiter: 2:32
Oh, the Dutch cuisine is horrible, to be honest. We have all of the crockets and the bitterbollen, but it's basically the stump of the mashed potatoes and with carrots, but basically it's not something that I would recommend anyone. So, no, no, but to be honest, we like a bit of everything. So you can find Italian kitchen, some Chinese, basically everything. The French cuisine cuisine, um, yeah, that's good everywhere. I, I personally, really like the meats, right. So so the steaks, uh, etc. And it's. It's really sad if you go to argentina, where we got married, uh, it's a whole different ball game than it's here, but uh, no, no, the steak is great. I like the meat still.

Mark Smith: 3:20
I couldn't go to the Netherlands without having bitterbollen and croquettes, though.

Peter Ruiter: 3:25
I know, well, we do good sweets. I would say the stroopwafels and that sort of stuff. That's pretty good, we'll take them for…. Waffles are great. Yeah, take them for the family and the friends abroad. So yeah, that's, that's pretty good, we'll take him for. Uh, waffles are great. Yeah, take them for the family and the friends abroad.

Mark Smith: 3:39
So yeah, that's good and, and I find you can get some special chocolates and gummies and all sorts there and and the netherlands that are quite unique.

Peter Ruiter: 3:47
You don't get everywhere else in the world no, no, that is absolutely true, and I I think that the chocolate in in well, basically in europe, is much, much better than it's in America. The American chocolate is awful, it's an acquired taste, but if you come from Europe and you move over there, then it's not that great.

Mark Smith: 4:05
Yeah, so true, so true. At the end of the day, your country founded our country. Well, New Zealand is named after the Netherlands, right?

Peter Ruiter: 4:17
Yeah, yeah, and a bunch of places in in the states as well, I mean in new york. You see all of the, the, the names of the cities that are still resembling a lot of uh, um cities here, like brooklyn is brooklyn and new york was obviously new amsterdam before. So there's much, much heritage here and there that you come across. Yeah.

Mark Smith: 4:40
I went to a wedding in Canada, in Vancouver, and the family name getting married was Stroop, and so Stroop waffles were part of what was given out to everybody and, yeah, it was really good. Oh, that's cool. Tell me about your journey into tech. Why did you take this career?

Peter Ruiter: 5:04
Well, my journey was a little bit curvy, to be honest, when I well, I graduated in 2006 and back then there was not that much choice in in uh education as there is now. There's not so many, so many digital careers and so many different programming careers. It wasn't the thing back then. Obviously, you had java programming and that sort of stuff, but I I did something which was called media technology. It was a. It was a new education, a new study that doesn't exist anymore. So the thing that I did is it was actually part of the electro engineering, so I'm an actual engineer. But that was actually pretty nice. So it had a little bit of everything. It had game technology, simulation, but also like literally built bikes with simulators. That was part of the education. So that was pretty nice.

Peter Ruiter: 6:04
And after my graduation I started getting into building websites. That was the thing I mean. I was already doing that as a hobby and I rolled into PHP, open source programming. The Linux world did everything on PHP and I know it's now when you talk to all of the Microsoft guys it's like it's a curse word. Right? Php is not a, it's a hobby language, which I don't agree with. But back then it was kind of a fight back and forth but that was pretty great.

Peter Ruiter: 6:38
And I rolled into marketing automation based on PHP. So we built asset management. I was doing some of the first marketing automation with actual snail mail. So back then that was magic, right. We did for a large bank in the Netherlands. We had programs that could see how much money you got into your account and then if you touch the mortgage calculator we could actually send you a letter with an image of a villa or a shackled home, which now it sounds like childish and stupid. But back then it was magic and we sent tens of thousands of letters a day by mail. And obviously later I did that for a few years and then suddenly the company went bankrupt, which is really strange because it was not our company. Our company was doing really well, but the mother company, the holding company, was actually a big printing corporation and that was well. Suddenly we went out of business. So we bought the company out of bankruptcy. We did that for a bunch more years and then I was kind of done. It was so many years that I did the same thing in the PHP.

Peter Ruiter: 7:56
I was the go-to guy for everything right, which at some point that should make you wonder like is this challenging enough for me again? Do I need to do something else? So I sold my shares and I switched to Microsoft, which was really strange, and I think it was one of the most uncomfortable moments in my life where I needed like six months to basically convince myself oh God, did I make the right choice? Because I went from the go-to guy that was me for many, many years to the guy who knows absolutely nothing right, and it was a C-sharp. It was a software company C-sharp. We did a lot of SharePoint, because Power Platform didn't even exist back then, custom development on SharePoint, and then Dynamics came up and Power Platform came later.

Peter Ruiter: 8:53
But that took me quite some time to get my grip again and to quickly become that go-to guy again. Because in the end, if you look back, it's just another dialect and the principles are all the same and the way of thinking is the same. But before I ended up in that space, it took some time and I did that for another seven years. It was well. It took some time and I did that for another seven years. And now I switched to Capgemini two and a half years ago, where it's a little bit bigger. It's a little bit more enterprise. It's a little bit. It's a different world. There's a lot of red tape, obviously, because it's much more enterprise than what I did before. So it has its pros and cons.

Peter Ruiter: 9:34
But yeah, now I'm here and, as you said, I was already doing a lot of public speaking. I was a trainer for many, many years at a previous company as well, so Microsoft Certified Trainer, which I really like. I really like to share my knowledge, et cetera. And being an MVP was kind of always on my wish list but never had the time, or well. I think it's about making time and prioritizing it, but it was never on my agenda to actually push myself out there, so to speak. Right. So I was doing all of those things but never put it in like, oh, it's something special. It was something that I would like to do and that I already did. I like to be the public speaking, to do the user groups and to share the knowledge and do the training, et cetera. But now, yeah, also, that is a little bit bigger and Capgemini is well big enough to sponsor a few trips here and there, so that comes in handy as well, right.

Mark Smith: 10:37
Nice, Nice, yeah With Capgem. Are you Capgem Netherlands or is Netherlands part of Europe? Capgem Europe? How do you segment up inside Capgem?

Peter Ruiter: 10:50
Yeah, so it's per country, but we obviously have a European framework as well, so we have a European COE, that well, I'm talking about the Microsoft side, right? Well, I'm talking about the Microsoft side, right. So if we look at the Microsoft side, it can geminize around 350,000 people. So it's a large, large company, and within the Netherlands, we got around 10,000, with SoCity included as well Wow, that's massive.

Peter Ruiter: 11:19
Yeah, that's pretty massive still, and then within that, we have around 300 people that are in the digital customer experience cluster that I'm in, and within that, we have 80 people that are fully on Dynamics and Power Platform. So I'm one of those 80. So I'm the Power Platform lead for Capgemini, the Netherlands, and my daily job consists mostly of doing dynamics projects and more complex projects. I really like the contact center space that we're in now. I mean, microsoft is doing massive steps there, but I come from that custom development side with all of the integration, all the Azure and all of the custom development, so that still is close to my heart, right? So, yeah, within that, 80 people, I think, yeah, I'm one of the principals there, so that, yeah.

Mark Smith: 12:21
Very good. Tell me about contact center how big you touched on it there? How big is that becoming? In particular, you know we've seen Microsoft go through iterations. I think it'd been about 20 years in the space back when I was selling it. It was way back. We had what was called the Customer Care Framework as in like. There was a lot of standards and guidance around how we created a single pane of glass. It was unified service desk and around 2015.

Peter Ruiter: 12:52
Oh, no, yeah yeah, yeah, I did all of that. Usd was horrible. Now, looking back to it, it was horrible, right. No, no, we did amazing things back then, yeah. So, as you said, I gradually lived through that as well, right? So when I started out with the company, we did Link and we did Skype and we did all of those things that are now basically the bottom layer of the whole stack. And then Teams came up, we had Dynamics.

Peter Ruiter: 13:23
So what you see is that Microsoft had all of those little pieces, those bits and pieces that are now becoming this gigantic product. They had that for a long time with Azure and the Azure Communication Service and the recording and transcription and translation, all of the cognitive services that they used to get the sentiment, and so it was really awesome to see all of those pieces come together into one product, and I can see the bits and pieces that we have for so many years now actually being tied together in a great way. So obviously there's lots of things to do, but if you look at the space of contact centers, where you see Puzzle or Genesis or Avaya, like the old-fashioned phone company, it's different, right. It's more of a platform ecosystem thing than it is actually a phone system. That is the other major figures. They already have Dynamics and now it ties into that and what you see is that they are rapidly developing this stuff, right. So it's a more than complete platform already. You have barging functionality, you have voicemail, you have incoming calls, you have outgoing calls, you have recording, sentiment analysis, transcription, translation all of that stuff in a real multi-channel way, so you can also do the chat and you can also elevate chats to screen sharing and co-browsing and that sort of stuff. But now it's being upgraded to also be part of that Teams ecosystem that they already have and really tying in that VoIP network where not every agent is actually part of Dynamics but most of the users in companies live on Teams, right? So getting those experts in that are on the back office that are not part of your Dynamics that is also being made into reality now. Outgoing robocalling is on the roadmap, right? So getting people, giving people a callback when it's their time in the queue instead of having them wait for 40 minutes, right?

Peter Ruiter: 15:38
All that sort of stuff that we as a customer, that I as a customer, love, are now part of that product, and we see that there's not many other products out there right. So we have a few. Google does its thing. We got Amazon Connect, but it's not all as feature-complete as Microsoft is. So they're really a step ahead as Microsoft is. So they're really a step ahead.

Peter Ruiter: 16:03
Plus, what I really like and I think that is a really great move is that they made all of that contact center functionality also available for third-party CRMs, so I can literally have my call center functionality from Microsoft with Copilot and my recording and transcription, and I can put it in my Salesforce right. So the people that we have we have lots of clients. It's as Capgemini. We service ServiceNow and Pega and Salesforce and SAP all of this stuff as well. So we got lots of clients who are on Salesforce and not per se hate Microsoft, and now we can have the best of both worlds, which is amazing. Yeah, that's really cool. I love doing the thing that fits the customer most right, and this is it in most of the time.

Mark Smith: 17:22
Two to three years ago there was the scenario and that was the last time I was involved in this area where you had Microsoftrosoft had a, a phone system product that ran inside teams and then you had the contact centerpiece right and the two were kind of like different teams from microsoft would be selling this. One, of course, would come from the teams based m365 part of the org, the other would come from more the biz app side of the org. Um, has that been unified as in? Because you know, the last I was like on a government project, the last one, and they've just gone through a whole cycle of moving to all their voice layer being done in microsoft teams. So therefore, uh, I don't know, do we still use the term soft phone, because it's one of these teams, right, I still use it?

Peter Ruiter: 18:12
yeah, no, but if so, we got the ACS, which is obviously the part where that is tied into Dynamics, so you can actually have the first party calling from Microsoft, where you purchase numbers from Microsoft and tie that into your Dynamics and then they have, like, a managed Azure communication service. Or you can do that yourself in Azure and that into your Dynamics and then they have a managed Azure communication service, or you can do that yourself in Azure and then tying your direct routing, which is really cool you can bring your own carrier, which has a lot of advantages. I would always suggest doing that, to be honest.

Mark Smith: 18:45
As in, there's a lot of advantages with going with your direct carrier.

Peter Ruiter: 18:49
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you take a look at pricing, I mean for the ease of setup, definitely go full Microsoft, right. If you're in a greenfield, that's absolutely perfect. But if you take a look at licensing and of course most of our clients are not in a greenfield they have already carriers, they have contracts, cetera.

Peter Ruiter: 19:12
Incoming calls are really cheap, but outgoing calls are really expensive. So if you do outgoing calls in the Netherlands, it's 35 cents a minute, while incoming calls is one cent a minute. So it's insane, right. So if you have a lot of outgoing calls, the pricing needs some readjustment here and there, need some readjustment here and there. Plus, there's some small things, like if I want to do outgoing calls, I need to have those phone numbers tied into my ACS. If I do the full Microsoft setup, which is not usually the case Many companies have one main number that they want to have on the display when they do an outbound call, right, and you can't do that if you're in an all Microsoft setup. So there's a few gotchas here and there.

Peter Ruiter: 20:00
But back to your question.

Peter Ruiter: 20:01
If you see the pieces, so ACS is the thing that ties it down in Azure with Dynamics and on the other hand, we have all of the Teams infrastructure, which we have for a long time.

Peter Ruiter: 20:15
That also now has the queue app and, like, the reception desk, is now in Teams, which is an awesome app, by the way. That's really cool. What we're going to see, what is on the roadmap and it's coming out real soon, is that you can actually choose to bypass your ICS and just tie it right into Teams and then you have that real merge, so to speak, of those infrastructures, and we saw that. So Microsoft is calling it internally the VNex platform. We can now do around 5,000 calls simultaneously per org, which is really more than enough for every company that we have, at least as a client. So you can see that Microsoft is really busy scaling things up, making things more resilient and tying that into the team's infrastructure. So it's a really great team. To be honest, also on the Microsoft side, they're really receptive to feedback. They're really doing rapid innovation. So, yeah, I'm really excited.

Mark Smith: 21:22
Nice, what's the compete like with Genesys?

Peter Ruiter: 21:25
Well, we do have a lot of clients that are still on Genesys and they also use Genesys with Dynamics or in combination with Dynamics, right. So that's all fine. But you can see that where they use Genesis, they mostly use the CTI integration into Dynamics. So you get that little side pane on the channel integration framework which works okay, but then you're missing out on all of the awesome stuff like the transcription and the sentiment and the recording and that sort of stuff. And sure, genesis is offering the same right. So they say, no, we can do recording and we can do transcription, but then it's outside of the platform. So what you see is that suddenly Copilot doesn't work, right, suddenly Copilot doesn't work and you can't. I mean, if you use the Microsoft way through ACS, you can now have Dynamics offer while you're on the phone. Hey, this is the most factual knowledge base article for you, right? So the empowerment of the agent you're missing if you're doing it through a CTI.

Mark Smith: 22:35
Yeah, so is a together play. Is there an option for Genesys to coexist with Microsoft?

Peter Ruiter: 22:42
Yeah, yeah, of course that looks good. If it looks good, I don't know. You can see them struggling a bit to find a proper way of working together. But Microsoft I think Microsoft is doing that really well. They basically say we have a full way of integrating. So this is our channel integration framework. You can do that. We have direct line. You can tie into that, you can tie into the chat, we have all sorts of APIs that you can call upon and then you can literally make use of our platform. If you're the other end of the coin, but you're not seeing that they're picking that up and I get that because they have instead of tying it into Dynamics or tying it into the Microsoft ecosystem, you can see that they've rather built their own suite. You can see that they've rather built their own suite. So instead you can see that they're building a CRM instead of focusing on which, of course, it's never going to be on par with a 20-year-old.

Peter Ruiter: 23:41
Exactly no, no, no. They're never going to get that market share like Salesforce or Dynamics CRM which is also fine, right, there's a space for everyone but it's for a different kind of customer than the customers that we're dealing with.

Mark Smith: 23:59
To be honest, Peter, this has been super interesting. Great talking to you. Hopefully we'll get to see you shortly. Are you going to Dynamics Mines?

Peter Ruiter: 24:10
No, I'm going to well, that is also a thing. I would love to go to Dynamics Mines. No, I'm going to well, that is also a thing. I would love to go to Dynamics Mines. But at the same time there is the BizApps Summit in Germany, in Dusseldorf, and Capgemini. Yeah, it's not on purpose, but it's very unfortunate that it's exactly the same dates and Capgemini is also a sponsor on the BizApps one. So I mean not that I'm forced to go there by Capgemini, but I feel like I should show some loyalty of being there. So I'm going to be speaking on that one. But yeah, dynamics Minds is going to be awesome as well. I'm going to do the MVP Summit, so hopefully we'll see you there yeah, perfect.

Mark Smith: 24:56
Be good. Thank you, sir.

Peter Ruiter: 24:57
Have a great evening, Mark.

Mark Smith: 25:04
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.