Behind every modern contact center transformation is a group of passionate practitioners: people who don’t just adopt technology but shape how it’s used, challenged, and improved.
The Contact Center Champions Community brings together these practitioners from around the world. As customer advocates, they are deeply hands‑on with Dynamics 365 Contact Center. They actively influence product direction and share real‑world insights with peers and Microsoft engineering teams.
Below, we’re spotlighting those champions whose journeys reflect diversity, ambition, and impact. Bookmark this page to stay updated on new champion stories.
Please visit Customer Success Stories | Microsoft for more curated organizational stories.
Dr. Tasos Lazarides
Director of Digital Transformation
California State University San Marcos
Dr. Tasos Lazarides, Director of Digital Transformation at California State University San Marcos (CSUSM), is leading a campus-wide effort to modernize how students engage with the university by transforming fragmented processes and student profiles into a unified engagement model. This work builds on a long-standing strategy to bring student data, engagement data, and support history together on a single student lifecycle platform.
After establishing a foundation with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Dr. Lazarides and his team are now expanding that vision with Dynamics 365 Contact Center, connecting student data, support history, and communication across every channel into a single, coherent experience for students and staff. By connecting channels and equipping agents with real-time context, the university can move faster toward their ultimate goal of helping each individual student succeed.
Every student’s journey is unique. We’re building a university that adapts to them, not one that asks them to adapt to us. The tools we’re deploying exist for one reason: to make it easier for every student at CSUSM to succeed by meeting them where they are and providing the right information, at the right time, every time.
Amar Roomi
Chief Technology and Transformation Officer
Blue Zebra
Amar Roomi is the CTO of Blue Zebra Insurance; a cloud‑native Managing General Agent (MGA) founded just over eight years ago with the vision of becoming a digital‑first MGA that sells exclusively through brokers. Leading a technology and transformation function of approximately 50 staff, with more than 60% focused on engineering, Amar has evolved Blue Zebra’s platform from a monolithic application into a microservices‑based platform built for scalability and automation.
Blue Zebra launched Dynamics 365 Contact Center in mid‑2025 with 60 seats, including approximately 50 frontline agents and 10 supervisory staff, with plans to double that capacity following recent mergers. The vision extends beyond traditional telephony: Amar sees the contact center as a core service orchestration layer integrated directly into core business systems. The team has enabled the Case Management Agent, is deploying a conversational agent that collects claim information during hold times and is building automated call evaluation using quality assurance agents. His approach, balancing native platform capabilities with targeted customization to retain roadmap access, offers a blueprint for how digital‑native organizations can leverage Dynamics 365 Contact Center as a strategic platform, not just a phone system.
We don’t think of Contact Center as a phone system. It’s an orchestration layer for all our service interactions, a place where technology meets the customer and the agent to deliver consistent, and scalable, service excellence.
Sachin Patel
Head of IT Operations,
Sage Homes
As Head of IT Operations at Sage Homes, Sachin Patel leads the organization’s end‑to‑end journey with Microsoft Dynamics 365, supporting a rapidly growing social housing portfolio of nearly 22,000 properties across England. As Sage Homes brought tenant services fully in‑house, the contact center became a critical hub—requiring a platform that could handle high volumes, protect sensitive interactions, and give agents immediate context across customers and properties. Dynamics 365 Contact Center provided the foundation to unify voice, case management, and data into a single operational experience.
Rather than rushing adoption, Sachin’s team focused on building trust in the system, simplifying routing, designing experience‑based skill handling for agents, and reducing friction through a true 360‑degree view of tenants and properties. With Copilot‑powered summaries now embedded into daily workflows, agents can quickly understand long and complex interaction histories. Meanwhile, AI‑assisted chat handles high‑volume inquiries, reducing escalations to human agents by around 30%. Strong governance, reporting, and access controls ensure the platform scales responsibly as Sage Homes expands its use of AI and digital channels. Sachin’s approach reflects what it means to be a Contact Center Champion. He leads with pragmatic adoption, measurable outcomes, and AI deployed only where it delivers real operational value.
“We recently built a new contact center and we’re expecting to get 10,000 virtual customers overnight. We could not have met that demand without the omnichannel capabilities we have in Dynamics 365 Contact Center.“
Read the Sage Homes Story
Lorenz Corradini
Head of Center of Competence for Low Code/No-Code (Coc LCNC)
SIAG – Südtiroler Informatik Ag – Informatica Alto Adige Spa
Lorenz Corradini is leading a major transformation in how public services are delivered in South Tyrol, Italy. As the in‑house IT provider for regional public administration, SIAG supports more than 350 services across 23 domains. It serves citizens through healthcare, education, housing, and digital administration.
Facing over 40 siloed legacy systems and a looming workforce shortage, the team at SIAG adopted Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center to create a unified, data‑driven citizen engagement platform. Early results include 30% AI‑assisted resolution within weeks, faster service delivery, and rapid development of new digital services using Power Platform. Lorenz and team are laying the foundation for a more accessible, multilingual, and scalable model of public service delivery.
“We used to lose valuable citizen data across dozens of disconnected systems. That’s over. With Dynamics 365 Contact Center and Power Platform, every interaction is captured, connected, and actionable. The citizen is finally at the center, and we use that data to get better every single day.
Read the SIAG Story
Kamal Pandey
Lead Develop, Dynamics CRM
Sandvik Coromant
Kamal Pandey plays a key role in scaling a global, B2B contact center supporting manufacturing customers across industries such as automotive, aerospace, mining, and heavy engineering. Based in Sweden, Kamal leads CRM and contact center development for an organization with 3,000+ Dynamics users. In addition, it has four global customer service hubs spanning Europe, the Americas, India, and China.
Sandvik’s contact center runs fully on Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Dynamics 365 Contact Center, handling chat, voice, and email in a multilingual environment. The majority of capabilities are delivered through out‑of‑the‑box configurations. Kamal’s team is actively adopting AI‑driven features—such as quality evaluation agents for scalable coaching. It also takes a thoughtful, trust‑first approach to Copilot adoption. His focus on maintainability, scale, and agent experience shapes Contact Center adoption in complex enterprise B2B environments.
“At a global scale, customer operations demand systems that stay reliable under pressure, and complexity is the default. With Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform, we’ve created a sustainable architecture that supports thousands of users while using AI to enhance, never replace the human touch. For me, great customer experience starts with solid architecture and ends with people empowered to do their best work.”
Read the Sandvik Coromant Story
Watch the Sandvik Coromant demo at Microsoft Ignite.
Rosa Lohman
Business Analyst
GVB
Rosa Lohman supports customer service operations for Amsterdam’s public transport network, including trams, buses, metros, and ferries across the city. Working with a lean team, Rosa oversees how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service and Contact Center are used to manage voice, email, and web‑based inquiries for approximately 30 customer service agents.
Her team embraced Copilot‑powered call summaries and transcriptions to reduce manual effort and improve efficiency. They are exploring AI‑driven knowledge and case management agents to further optimize service delivery. With a strong focus on insight‑driven improvements, such as identifying automation opportunities for low‑value cases and evaluating digital channels like WhatsApp, Rosa brings a practical, user‑centered perspective to modernizing customer service in the public transportation sector.
Read the GVB Story
Gaëtan Dargnies
Product Manager
Sonepar
Gaëtan is a Product Manager for Digital Tools at Sonepar, the global leader in electrical material distribution, with 43,000–46,000 employees and €33 billion in revenue. Operating in a highly fragmented, branch‑centric model across multiple countries, Sonepar faces unique challenges in unifying customer service operations performed by Inside Sales populations at scale.
Gaëtan led the implementation of Dynamics 365 Contact Center in France with Teams telephony integration, scaling the deployment from a single branch to 48 branches and from 30 to 600 agents in just a few months. This is part of Sonepar’s broader “Spark” transformation program to unify countries on a single Dynamics platform. The company is now exploring AI use cases including email screening, categorization, and enrichment, with a dedicated AI team building their own data instance.
Multi‑language requirements across countries, strong workers’ councils, and different ERPs across branches add significant complexity—but Sonepar’s own Digital Factory’s ability to scale rapidly while navigating these constraints makes this Group a standout example of contact center transformation in distributed enterprise environments.
We went from one branch to forty‑eight in a matter of months. Now, we’re heading toward four more European operating companies in the coming months. The challenge isn’t only the technology—it’s aligning people, processes, and local practices across an entire continent.
