How Can Microsoft Teams Improve My Contact Center? – CX Today Roundtable

Converging UCaaS and CCaaS platforms became one of 2022’s biggest CX trends.

Expect this to continue in 2023, with many contact centers considering how to best connect their contact center with Microsoft Teams.

Why Teams? Because many businesses have already deployed the solution, with Microsoft leading the UCaaS market.

Moreover, there are many other benefits to making the move, as our panellists will explore. This month, they include:

• Simon Adnett, VP of Sales UK, Ireland & MEA at Enghouse Interactive
• Andy Rawll, Senior Manager of Product Marketing at 8x8
• Marco Cortese, President and Sales Director of Mida Solutions
• Artur Nowakowski, CTO at ContactCenter4ALL

Read on to gain each expert’s perspective on how a Microsoft Teams integration combats conventional contact center challenges and future-proofs the operation.

What Problems Will a Teams Integration Help Contact Centers Overcome?

Adnett: As a UCaaS platform, Teams acts as digital glue to bring together all elements of the contact center while unifying it with the broader business.

On an operational level, Teams breaks down barriers within the contact center by enabling better communication and collaboration.

How? By connecting disparate teams and removing silos, allowing people to work from anywhere, whether that’s at home or across various time zones.

These benefits translate to reduced costs, increased productivity, and greater employee retention through a better working experience.

On the customer side, Teams empowers agents with immediate access to information and the tools they need to do their jobs, such as workplace chat, video meetings, and shared document storage.

Also, it allows them to collaborate with back office experts, while supervisors have greater operational visibility.

As a result, customers receive better service across all channels, which is conducive to higher satisfaction and first contact resolution and rates.

Rawll: A contact center solution that integrates with Microsoft Teams has many benefits. It provides cohesion between a customer’s preferred CRM system and the workflows that power end-customer interactions and fuel positive customer sentiment.

Moreover, it allows hybrid working and collaboration to extend from Teams into the contact center. This acts as a catalyst for improved productivity, playing a critical role in reducing employee churn and improving staff retention.

Furthermore, Teams-enabled contact centers reveal insightful performance and adherence metrics. These facilitate internal operational efficiency and ensure compelling experiences for end-customers, driving impactful and measurable business outcomes.

Finally, a single communications platform with PSTN calling for Teams helps consolidate services under a single vendor and reduces administrative overheads.

Beyond that, it can empower Teams as a user’s standard dial interface for both CC and UC, simplifying onboarding, accelerating adoption, and eliminating the need for custom add-ons.

Cortese: A CCaaS integration adds to Microsoft Teams all the advanced call management features that agents use in a traditional environment.

As a result, everything they need to handle requests integrates into a unique cloud-based ecosystem, paving the way for hybrid work.

Indeed, agents can work from anywhere, enjoying a familiar, cohesive user experience.

Such an approach saves agents time when switching between applications. Instead, they have more information at their fingertips, streamlining their daily activities and allowing them to focus their attention on customer requests.

Furthermore, to enhance service quality, companies can analyze additional UC data. Combining this with Power BI allows contact centers to harness insights from across the organization and apply these to improve customer journeys.

Nowakowski: Using Microsoft Teams as an end-to-end communications platform provides businesses with an opportunity to fully remove legacy phone systems.

These decades-old PBX systems, creeping towards end of service life, are expensive to maintain and often bring security, support, and integration challenges.

Yet, where legacy telephony systems lack adaptability, a highly flexible, license-based model, like Teams, allows contact centers to scale up or down seamlessly. Such a system is ideal for organizations that experience seasonal surges in demand or are undergoing rapid business growth.

Moving to Teams also benefits businesses by shifting the administrative burden, such as updates, patching, and maintenance, away from in-house IT departments and over to the service provider. As such, the business enjoys greater cost control via the easy addition or removal of add-ons.

And, of course, Microsoft Teams offers next-generation cybersecurity, which is vital during these times of increased cyberattacks and highly damaging ransomware.

How Will a Microsoft Teams Integration Help Future-Proof the Contact Center?

Adnett: Microsoft Teams provides a platform for future innovation. Yes, it offers a unified, omnichannel communication and collaboration solution, but the contact center can also develop and evolve how it uses the platform.

By working with the right partner, operations can easily customize and add new modules as and when they like.

Also, because Teams links seamlessly to the broader Microsoft technology stack, contact centers can harness the company’s leading-edge innovations around the cloud, AI, and automation.

For example, companies can innovate in several ways by tapping into Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services - such as speech-to-text, translation, and sentiment analysis.

Indeed, they can analyze calls live and provide agents with data and knowledge in real-time that is pertinent to the customer’s query.

Alternatively, a contact center may extend its capabilities and translate interactions in real-time, allowing conversations where agents and customers don’t share a common language.

Using Azure Bot Services enables the company to create AI-powered chatbots integrated with its contact center infrastructure.

Rawll: Most notably, it supports a cloud-first solution strategy - optimized for hybrid working, flexible staffing models, and more.

Indeed, as part of the broadly-adopted Microsoft 365 business collaboration suite, Teams has become the predominant cloud-based communications solution.

Moreover, it enables customers to consolidate their legacy communications platforms and investments into a single system while reducing management overhead.

Finally, it embeds a CX solution into the organization that can flex, scale, and adapt to market needs.