How Solgari helped National Broadband Ireland improve responsiveness and instantly scale its customer experience capabilities

August 14, 2025
Solgari

In an era where connectivity has become a vital utility, just the same as electricity or water, there’s never been as much demand for reliable, high-speed broadband.

As the company responsible for delivering one of Europe’s most high-profile critical national infrastructure investments – Ireland’s National Broadband Plan – National Broadband Ireland (NBI) is taking on the complex task to ensure that no town, village or community is left behind. This means delivering infrastructure to the hardest to reach areas in this €5 billion project.

Recognised as the biggest investment in rural Ireland since rural electrification, NBI’s network is forecast to serve over 1.1 million customers nationwide. To support this, NBI has invested in state-of-the-art technologies across its operations, building a strong reputation in its quest to be a world-leader in the provision of open-access fibre broadband.

To manage its engagement with end customers and myriad stakeholders, NBI not only needed a customer engagement platform to effectively manage day-to-day demands, but it needed the agility to instantly scale to manage peaks in demand, such as during extreme weather events where customers can be temporarily left without service.

How NBI managed a 4X increase in interactions

Having made the decision to retire its outsourced contact centre, NBI rapidly onboarded 40 agents onto Solgari’s Microsoft-certified application for Teams in a matter of days in January 2025.

The timing of the onboarding was crucial as it preceded Storm Éowyn, which, given its destructive nature, caused service interruptions and as a result, inbound contacts quadrupled – across end customers, broadband providers and field-technician channels. With Solgari for Microsoft Teams up and running, agents could confidently stay in control in a situation where the previous outsourced model would not have been able to scale in real time.

“Moving the contact centre in-house wasn’t just about cutting costs,” says David Lucas, Network and Customer Operations Director at NBI. “We needed direct control and agility. Also, Solgari’s application is available as part of Microsoft Teams and this meant no downtime, as well as making it intuitive for agents to adopt.”

Why did NBI choose Solgari for Microsoft Teams?

NBI needed a rapid, resilient solution that:

Is available natively in its existing, secure Teams ecosystem (aligned with Microsoft’s compliance standards).
Eliminated multi-system hand-offs and disjointed data flows, creating a single view of all customer interactions and the base for using AI in customer engagement.
Scaled instantly without new infrastructure.

What did NBI gain?

40 agents onboarded in under seven days, using the familiar MS Teams interface.
Unified support for end customers, broadband providers, and field technicians on a single platform.
100 % service continuity even with a quadrupling of interactions.

“Solgari enabled us to handle every urgent enquiry – from end customer service interruption reports to field-technician alerts – in real time,” reflects Mairead Meyer, Chief Operations Officer at NBI. “Our callers received automated IVR updates, reducing repeat calls and improving customer experience.”

What’s next for NBI?

Having already proven operational resilience in a short space of time, NBI is exploring Solgari’s additional capabilities, including:

Omni-channel expansion (web chat, WhatsApp, social messaging).
Use Solgari for Teams integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to capture all customer conversations, leading to the use of AI and launch proactive outreach customer campaigns.
Utilising Solgari Copilot assistance for live agents across transcription, summary and sentiment analysis.
AI-driven self-service chat agents for routine queries and guided troubleshooting.

“NBI’s rapid-fire deployment exemplifies why we built our platform,” says John Colgan, CEO of Solgari. “They moved from a fragmented outsourced model to a fully unified, agile customer engagement inside Teams – and emerged confident to handle peaks in customer demand, moving towards a full AI powered omni-channel customer engagement offering.”