Amazon leads the CCaaS market in customer acquisition, yet lags other prominent providers in customer retention.
Such is the conclusion of a 2022 Metrigy study entitled: "Contact Center Platform Gain/Retain," which highlights this through the following chart.
Digging deeper, the research reveals that the top reason companies leave Amazon is that they want to use a single integrated platform for both unified communications and contact centres.
Why? First and foremost, companies look to leverage their investment around Teams migration for Contact Centre needs, efficiently tying UC and CC under one single technology infrastructure.
But moreover, it is not only traditional customer service agents that communicate with customers – especially in smaller businesses. IT, HR, finance, sales, marketing, and numerous other departments may also benefit from the telephony, alongside the knowledge management, IVR, routing, queuing, and automation tools available within modern CCaaS platforms.
However, these departments rarely have the resources to integrate traditional contact centre tools into their technology ecosystem. It is often considered overkill.
Thankfully, recent innovations that bring CCaaS capabilities into Microsoft Teams present an attractive alternative.
Why Microsoft Teams?
In 2021, Metrigy surveyed 395 companies, across 39 verticals, in 11 countries located in North America. 70 percent of those businesses used Teams.
The platform – therefore - offers a familiarity that many employees will likely enjoy.
Yet, the success of Teams is perhaps also testament to the feature-rich ecosystem Microsoft offers.
Making this point, Gidi Adlersberg, Director of Product Marketing & Business Development, at AudioCodes, says:
Microsoft has a strong foothold in AI with Azure Cognitive Service, in Collaboration services with Teams, and data collection/aggregation with Dynamics, which all function and interconnect within the very same ecosystem.
Indeed, such an ecosystem is potentially powerful when connected with Microsoft’s many other CX technologies, including its business intelligence, journey orchestration, and cognitive tools.
For this reason, more businesses are starting to look for CCaaS platforms that integrate with Teams, as they may already use - or plan to use - other technologies within the Microsoft stack.
A New Way to Merge Microsoft Teams with the Contact Centre
As previously noted, when businesses wish to empower users throughout the enterprise with CX technology, they once had to deploy an expensive, comprehensive CCaaS solution. Such a platform often proves too capable for what companies actually need.
For many, justifying such a cost was tricky. It just doesn’t make sense to purchase a premium CC platform for IT helpdesk, HR or other internal business lines. However, a UC tool – such as Microsoft Teams – does not cut the mustard on its own, failing to allow users across the business to communicate with customers effectively.
Enter the Voca Conversational Interaction Center. Plugging the gap, it provides much more than is natively available within Microsoft Teams.
No, it is not a Genesys, NICE, or Five9, but it is a "contact centre lite" that delivers the most critical components of a CCaaS solution, coupled with built-in conversational AI, all tightly integrated and leveraging Teams to its full extent.
Sharing more, Adlersberg states:
