How FEIN unified global telephony in Microsoft Teams, without giving up the features it relied on

When FEIN migrated 400 employees from an ISDN phone system to Microsoft Teams, the company quickly ran into the limits of native Teams functionality: the complex call routing that sales and service depended on every day simply couldn't be reproduced. Luware Nimbus closed that gap. Natively integrated into Teams, with no loss of functionality and no third-party agents. And the rollout to 15 international subsidiaries, with another 400 employees, is already being planned. 

The challenge 

“Germans are pretty spoilt when it comes to telephony.”  That's how Andreas Schock, Head of IT at FEIN, sums up the starting point. In German companies, ISDN telephony never meant simply “making calls.” For decades it meant configurations that had grown over time: assistant call-handling, hunt-group overflows, shared sales hotlines where colleagues can step in the moment someone is briefly unavailable and IVR menus that reliably guide callers to the right person.

Two full server racks in the data centre in Bargau. That was the physical footprint of a telephony infrastructure built up over many years. Migrating to Teams without Luware Nimbus would have meant scrapping all of it with nothing to replace it.

The requirements were clear:

• Shared hotline routing with call pickup across the sales, service and IT teams
• DTMF IVR to pre-qualify calls before they reach an agent
• Attendant Console for the switchboard, so reception can see calls in context, prioritize them and transfer them
• Postcode-based routing to automatically assign French customers to the account manager responsible for their area
• Reporting to measure and improve the service quality of the hotlines
• Full native Microsoft Teams integration, no additional application, no agent tool alongside Teams
  
  

The last point was non-negotiable. FEIN follows a strict dual-vendor strategy: Microsoft and SAP.

 After evaluating several providers, the decision came down clearly in favour of Luware Nimbus. 

The solution

Native Microsoft Teams integration: no exceptions, no compromises

Luware Nimbus runs entirely inside the Microsoft Teams client. Everyone at FEIN, from contact center staff to the switchboard to the sales team works in Microsoft Teams. There's nothing extra to open, nothing extra to log into, no application opening in the background. For a company that has built its digital workplace consistently around Microsoft, that's the decisive difference.

Advanced call routing: sales, service and the IT hotline

Luware Nimbus handles the central inbound call routing for all of FEIN's key hotlines. Sales teams share a single number; if someone is briefly unavailable, the call immediately appears for a colleague, so no customer falls through the cracks. The service and IT lines follow their own routing logic, with queues and overflow rules configured precisely to FEIN's requirements.

For the France location, the routing goes a step further: callers are automatically assigned to the account manager responsible for their area based on their postcode, set up with regular expressions directly in the Luware Nimbus workflow. No manual intervention. No rerouting through the switchboard.

Attendant Console: a smarter switchboard

The main switchboard in Bargau uses the Luware Nimbus Attendant Console for all call handling. Staff see the call context, recognize why someone is calling and transfer them with a single click to the colleague they need, one who is actually available. Since IVR pre-qualification began sending the majority of calls straight to the right team, the pressure on the switchboard has eased noticeably. What was once a bottleneck has become an efficient hub.

DTMF IVR: the right person, first time

FEIN runs a DTMF-based IVR on its central dial-in number: callers choose for themselves whether to reach sales, service or the switchboard. The result: fewer calls that have to be transferred manually, less work for the switchboard, and customers who reach the right team on the very first contact.

Workflow Editor: configure it visually, without telephony expertise

For Sven Buchstaller, the Luware Nimbus Workflow Editor has fundamentally changed the way he thinks about telephony administration. Everything is visual, drag-and-drop, right in the browser. What used to require a specialist and a lengthy maintenance window on the Siemens system now takes only minutes.

What particularly surprised Buchstaller was the quality of the multilingual voice prompts. For the Belgian subsidiary, the system had to correctly distinguish between Belgian French and international French, a notoriously tricky edge case. He first tried to achieve that quality with other tools and recorders — and eventually gave up. 

Power BI reporting: measuring what matters

FEIN used the Luware Nimbus Power BI template to measure the IT hotline's service quality in a structured way over three months. It captured call pickup rates, time spent waiting in the queue and abandoned calls. The data led to two kinds of measures: organizational adjustments (clearer rules within the team about who answers and when) and technical improvements (announcements were shortened, because overly long waits were causing callers to hang up).

The team kept up the monthly reviews for another six months and built the analysis into its regular IT team meetings. The goal: every call that comes in during service hours gets answered.

Rollout and support

Going live was deliberately unspectacular, and that's meant as a compliment. After the proof of concept, FEIN's IT team configured the IT hotline itself, relied on the Luware knowledge base for most tasks and opened support tickets for more complex scenarios. Those were answered quickly.

One thing he especially values: the Luware status page, with its proactive incident notifications. With an on-premises system, an outage meant hours of uncertainty. Is it the hardware? The network? The provider? Today Buchstaller opens the status page, opens a ticket if needed, and gets a notification the moment the problem is fixed. 

Results and outlook

What's changed

The two server racks in the data center are history. Every hotline: sales, customer service, IT, the switchboard now runs over Microsoft Teams with Luware Nimbus, with no loss of capability and several genuine improvements: callers reach the right team faster, the switchboard is no longer a manual routing bottleneck, IT service quality has been measured and improved, and the routing logic that used to need telephony specialists can now be adjusted by an IT administrator in a browser.

Cloud-only for 15 subsidiaries: planned for 2026/2027

The next big step is already decided. FEIN plans to move all 15 international subsidiaries — in France, the US and other European countries — from their respective local telephony infrastructure to Microsoft Teams audio. Today each subsidiary still runs its own solution through regional providers such as Arcor or BT. That's set to change: one platform, one standard, worldwide.

Luware Nimbus will be deployed wherever the subsidiaries' requirements go beyond what Microsoft Teams can cover natively. The technical preparations are already under way.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM integration: the next step

FEIN is currently evaluating the integration of Luware Nimbus with Microsoft Dynamics CRM for sales and technical customer service. The use case is simple and the payoff is significant: when a customer calls the sales hotline, the matching CRM record appears automatically in Teams, before the call is even answered. Call history, open orders, contact notes are all visible before the first word is spoken. Outbound calls can be initiated directly from Dynamics.

For a company that sees personal customer relationships as a real competitive advantage, this is the logical next step: Luware Nimbus is evolving from a routing tool into a complete inbound and outbound sales-enablement platform.

A partnership built on openness

What FEIN values about working with Luware isn't the product brochure. It's the conversations that happen when something isn't running ideally. When FEIN was paying for a license module it wasn't actively using, Luware made it possible to switch it off rather than insisting on the contract term. A small gesture. A clear signal.

Three things FEIN would tell any IT leader before a Teams telephony migration

1. Native integration isn't a nice-to-have, it's the whole point! Every alternative FEIN evaluated needed a parallel application, a browser pop-up or a separate agent tool. The moment you force users to work in two interfaces, you've lost adoption. Luware Nimbus runs in Teams. That's what makes a dual-vendor strategy workable in practice.
2. Understand the licensing model before you build the first workflow. Luware Nimbus is a powerful tool. That very flexibility makes it tempting to expand the scope step by step as requests come in from the business units. Every expansion can push licensing costs upward. This isn't a criticism, as the value is real.
3. The Workflow Editor changes what “IT resource” means in telephony. What used to require a certified telephony specialist with access to proprietary hardware, a capable IT administrator can now do with a browser. The drag-and-drop interface, the built-in multilingual prompt generation, the instant visual overview of how calls branch, these aren't cosmetic features. They're the reason a lean IT team can own and develop its telephony configuration on its own.

FEIN GmbH is headquartered in Bargau, Germany. Founded in 1867, the company employs around 800 people worldwide and is the inventor of the electric power tool. More information: www.fein.com