Engineers Australia improves member experience and builds team capacity with Dynamics 365 Contact Center

The problem: fragmented systems, invisible members.  

For many people, the engineering profession can feel abstract—what exactly do engineers do? Yet these professionals quite literally make our day-to-day life possible. They imagine, design, and maintain the devices, buildings, and infrastructure we rely on. From medical tools and prosthetic limbs to hydroelectric power plants and the new skyscraper being erected downtown, engineers are behind it all. 

Engineers Australia has supported the people in this vital profession for more than 100 years. The organization credentials professionals, provides ongoing education and development, nurtures a STEM pipeline, vets engineers from overseas, and advocates for evidence-based professions that benefit members, communities, and the national interest. 

Just as Engineers Australia’s members improve the country’s roads, bridges, electrical grid, and more, the nonprofit is modernizing its digital infrastructure. This far-reaching initiative aims to unite disparate systems, facilitate growth, and empower staff to serve its 140,000 members.  

“It was important for us to get a more integrated ecosystem that would scale, enable a single customer view, and take away friction from the member-facing side of the business,” explains Jason Yates, Group Executive of Digital and Technology at Engineers Australia.

With the support of Microsoft partner Fusion5, the nonprofit recently adopted Microsoft Dynamics 365 as its CRM, including an impactful rollout of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center. The platform empowers the customer experience team to answer questions faster, provide a more personalized experience, and support the growing base of engineers in Australia.  

“This work is enabled by modern technology and Microsoft, but it’s more than just a digital transformation,” says Ricky Peña, Group Executive of Members and Customers at Engineers Australia. “Every efficiency, every savings we gain, we reinvest into a better member experience. Our members want to be connected to our organization and be part of this community. These systems are helping them feel like, I’m an individual—Engineers Australia knows who I am.” 

Partnering for an accelerated rollout with immediate impact 

Amid an organization-wide digital transformation, Engineers Australia leadership chose to prioritize the customer experience department. “There was a clear opportunity to work with Fusion5 to deliver the work on Dynamics 365 Contact Center quickly,” Yates says. “We could see the immediate impact that work was going to have on member experience. We weren’t wrong.” 

First, Fusion5 presented Engineers Australia with a Dynamics 365 Contact Center proof of concept. “It worked so much better than our existing system that we wondered if we could just scale the proof of concept,” remembers Rachel Au, General Manager of Operations Support at Engineers Australia.  

The teams knew they could do even better, though. In just a few months, Fusion5 helped Engineers Australia transition to a Dynamics 365 Contact Center customized to the nonprofit’s needs, test it, and roll it out across the department. Yates recalls, “Fusion5 provided a lot of guidance, from the development of our requirements to the planning around implementation. It was incredibly smooth.” 

Dynamics 365 Contact Center replaces several legacy CRMs, a traditional telephony platform, and other systems. Engineers Australia’s technology team is decommissioning these outdated systems, with more on the way. The nonprofit is bringing on Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to create a unified view of member interactions and engagement, helping staff and the marketing team deliver more personalized and responsive member experiences. 

They are also exploring other Microsoft products. Yates says, “We’ll certainly see reductions in our overall costs related to licensing and support.”  

Savings in technical infrastructure reduce the cost of interacting with members, which is a key metric for the nonprofit. It also lightens the administrative burden on the IT team, as they do not have to juggle relationships with multiple vendors, track licensing timelines, or handle security and other support for various platforms and integrations. 

“We’re redirecting those savings to deliver member value,” Peña explains. He anticipates shifting budget to events, advocacy work, and programming, such as their youth STEM outreach initiatives.  

Saving time for members and staff

Research from Engineers Australia suggests that Australia will need 100,000 more engineers by 2030 to meet existing needs, while demand for the profession is projected to increase by 20% over the next decade. This sustained shortage in engineers leads to backlogs, delayed projects, and risk of deteriorating infrastructure.  

While Engineers Australia tackles this big-picture capacity challenge, Dynamics 365 Contact Center helps busy engineers focus on their job, not waiting on hold. “The new system helps us be more efficient. That way our members get back to their work rather than spending time on the phone with us,” Au explains.  

Since adopting Dynamics 365 Contact Center, the average hold time decreased by nearly 20%. In addition, now 70% of callers’ issues are resolved on the first try. Multiplied across the hundreds of calls Engineers Australia receives a day, that saves both agents and members a lot of time.  

What’s more, customer experience staff now handle more cases and calls. This means increasing the team’s capacity to support more students, migrants, and others interested in the profession to pursue this career—and tackle Australia’s significant engineering gap.   

Creating a better experience for members 

Engineers Australia serves professionals and aspiring engineers in many ways. That means the questions the nonprofit receives vary, from inquiries about events and professional development to specializations and credentialing.   

The call center team used to work across multiple CRM, phone, and data-storing systems, which required clunky integrations. These aging platforms also needed ongoing and manual maintenance simply to stay running, much less keep up with Engineers Australia’s evolving needs. Constant “swivel chairing” between various screens, views, and systems took valuable time, prevented a coherent view of members, and sometimes led to inconsistent answers, Au explains. “It was really difficult to navigate, the data didn't necessarily match, and it caused frustration for both our members and staff,” she adds.   

Dynamics 365 Contact Center has transformed day-to-day work in the call center. Even before a staff member picks up, Dynamics 365 Contact Center intelligently routes the call. The system may send a caller with a tricky issue to an experienced agent while inquiries about a routine matter go to a more junior agent. “Routing calls to qualified agents improves the customer experience, as well as helps agents not become overwhelmed,” Au notes. 

Dynamics 365 Contact Center is proving especially helpful during peak times, such as membership renewal season, when call volume more than triples. The system routes easy-to-resolve matters to temp agents, who join during surges to prevent long waits. Further, Dynamics 365 Contact Center enables members to request a call back instead of waiting on hold, which saves their space in the queue.  

Once a staff member is ready to assist, Dynamics 365 Contact Center displays the caller’s name, membership duration, and other details such as their engineering specialty. “It enables our agents to prepare for and personalize the conversation,” Au says.  

The improvement supports one of Engineers Australia’s key objectives. “I can’t overstress the importance of personalization,” Peña says. “If the person on the other end of the phone knows a member’s name and the kind of concern they have, that’s already a thousand times better than what we had before.”  

Supporting smoother workflows with AI 

In addition, the customer experience team relies on Copilot in Dynamics 365, which is automatically integrated within the new system. The AI assistant automatically transcribes conversations, creating complete histories within members’ Dynamics 365 records. “With auto call transcripts, agents can actually focus on the conversation with the customer and really understand what the members need,” Au says.  

In addition, Copilot in Dynamics 365 automatically creates tickets for issues that require further attention. It populates the case based on the call and information from previous interactions stored in the member’s record.  

The customer experience agent can follow up on the case, assign it to a more senior agent, or share it with a specialist in another department, who can then see the member’s entire history through Dynamics 365 Contact Center. With the new system, nothing is lost in translation. This saves time for both staff and members, who do not have to repeat themselves.   

In addition, Engineers Australia has activated the Customer Knowledge Management Agent in Dynamics 365 to assist customer experience staff. The agent draws from a hub of articles staff recently updated about common topics, such as requirements for becoming credentialed by the nonprofit. What’s more, Engineers Australia is now working with Fusion5 to develop a public-facing chatbot with Microsoft Copilot Studio. The chatbot will allow website visitors to get answers on their own time, including outside of business hours. 

These projects represent the tip of the iceberg for how generative and agentic AI can support Engineers Australia. “Copilot gives us great opportunities for orchestrating member service, automating the way we handle cases, and other processes across the organization,” Yates says.  

Engineers Australia's investment in a connected Microsoft platform is also accelerating adoption of AI across the organization. “We’ve seen a groundswell of Copilot use across the organization,” Peña says. “Having Dynamics 365 Contact Center integrated into Copilot and the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem has huge downstream benefits for us.” 

Empowering teams to grow 

Dynamics 365 Contact Center provides a level of visibility that customer experience team leaders have never had. Previously, managers manually crunched metrics such as call volume, duration of calls, hold times, and more, with little granularity about individual agents. Now a Dynamics 365 Contact Center tracker automatically refreshes statistics with the most recent data.  

In addition to replacing a time-consuming task that netted outdated information, the tracker helps managers coach agents. The Dynamics 365 Contact Center tracker calculates each agent’s performance and even displays the average sentiment of callers. The data helps coaching conversations feel more evidence-based and less like personal criticism. It also informs managers’ decision on when to advance agents to a higher tier of customer support.  

Further, managers can now easily listen to recorded or live conversations. It used to be a time-consuming process to download a previous call recording, which often failed. “It’s especially great for when we have members who are unhappy or there’s been an issue,” Au says. The live sentiment tracking and ability to listen in also empowers a manager to message an agent with support or step in on the call to help. 

The tracker makes the data visible to everyone. Au sometimes overhears data-related friendly banter, such as agents complimenting one another on their quick call times or positive caller sentiment. 

With a skilled team of call center agents, connected technology systems, and a runway for future improvements, Engineers Australia is poised to serve both current members and the engineers of tomorrow. 

Peña says, “Working in an integrated Microsoft ecosystem helps us to scale. Whilst we’re realizing benefits now, we’ll see more in the years to come. Technology enables our growth trajectory.”