Your Guide to Microsoft Teams Contact Centres

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Introduction

Microsoft Teams has rapidly evolved to become one of the most powerful tools in any business landscape. Brimming with functionality to enable collaboration and productivity, Teams can unify your workforce, no matter where your employees are in the world.

As of 2022, Microsoft Teams has more than 270 million monthly active users, and numbers continue to grow. For the many organisations with an existing investment in the Microsoft ecosystem, such as Microsoft Office, Exchange, and Azure, Teams is the natural choice for internal collaboration and unified communications.

However, as the world of work continues to evolve, and teams become increasingly distributed, many organisations are beginning to consider the benefits of aligning more of their staff within the same cloud environment. Embracing Teams as a Contact Centre solution allows companies to combine internal communication strategies with external customer contact.

The benefits include everything from better-synchronised staff members to greater data insights and even significant cost savings. The question is, how exactly do you convert Microsoft Teams into a dedicated content centre?

The Benefits of a Microsoft Teams Connected Contact Centre

Microsoft Teams has rapidly emerged as the central backbone of communication for thousands of organisations worldwide. With a Microsoft Teams contact centre, companies can combine their UCaaS and CCaaS strategy for better end-to-end communications.

The right Connected contact centre solution for Microsoft Teams brings all the functionality you need for an effective contact centre into your Teams environment. Some of the biggest benefits of Microsoft Teams Connected Contact Centres include:

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01. A Centralised UCaaS and CCaaS environment

One of the most significant benefits of a Connected Microsoft Teams contact centre, is the ability to align your UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) strategy, with your contact centre. Your agents will be able to collaborate effectively with specialists on the back-end of your team whenever they need help dealing with a complex customer issue.

A centralised environment can help to improve productivity, by minimising the time your users spend moving between apps, and improve customer service. After all, when agents can access the support they need from specialists, they’re far more likely to deliver quick responses to problems.

An integrated solution for Microsoft Teams also builds on the environment your employees are already familiar with in their day-to-day work. This means you get a secure and robust environment which doesn’t require a lot of extensive training to use.

02. Flexibility and Scalability

The Microsoft Teams contact centre environment allows companies to build a comprehensive solution for customer service in the cloud.

The natural flexibility of the CCaaS environment ensures companies can expand or evolve their contact centre whenever they choose.

Companies can add new integrated abilities to the environment at any time with connected apps, bots, and unique solutions.

There’s also the option to add or remove users from your workforce as often as you choose.

03. In-depth Insights

When your contact centre and UC environment are aligned with the help of a Microsoft Teams partner, it’s much easier to get deeper insights into your business. You can use Microsoft Power BI to analyse metrics about your employees’ performance, and implement new tools for analysing sentiment and customer voice.

A cloud contact centre on Microsoft Teams can also align multiple channels of communication, from voice through to WhatsApp, so you can track every part of the customer journey. This not only helps to boost agent productivity, it also makes it easier to deliver personalized and contextual experiences, while getting a complete view of the customer journey map.

04. Productivity Boosts

As an all-in-one environment for communication, a Microsoft Teams contact centre can have a direct impact on your team productivity levels. Not only do your staff members spend less time moving between disconnected apps, but they can also access a range of features to make their lives easier. Auto attendants can help route calls to agents based on their skill sets, which means fewer transfers are necessary.

Embedded bots can help agents to find the colleague they need to contact, while presence features show who is available online.

05. Improved Employee Experience

While a great contact centre is a valuable investment in improving customer experience, it can also be a valuable tool for improving employee engagement and performance too. A Microsoft Teams contact centre creates a more streamlined and efficient experience for both agents and supervisors alike.

Team members can manage conversations with customers in a range of channels in one location. What’s more, because your agents will likely already be familiar with Microsoft Teams, there’s less need for training. As an added benefit, Microsoft Teams contact centres in the cloud open the door for a wider range of work types. Employees can work just as efficiently in a hybrid or remote environment as they do in a day-to-day office.

06. Options

A Microsoft Teams Connected contact centre is a highly flexible solution built on an open and extensible platform.

When delivered by qualified Microsoft partners, other forms of functionality can be added into your toolkit based on your specific needs. For instance, you can use Microsoft apps to add connections to common tools like Salesforce or Microsoft dynamics.

Alternatively, access to APIs and SDKs can allow partners to build more complex and customised integrations for companies with a wider range of tools.

07. Security and Reliability

Microsoft Teams contact centres are built on a proven foundation created within the Microsoft ecosystem.

This means that you can get thepeace of mind associated with best-in-class security measures and compliance features from Microsoft. At the same time, your deliverypartner or Contact Center vendor can offer a wide range of other features to help make you more compliant.

For instance, securing access to call recordings through native Microsoft authentication (AD) and role based access.

08. Opportunities for Growth

As mentioned above, a Microsoft Teams Connected contact centre benefits from going beyond the basics of a standard one-size- fits-all contact centre. You can also access expertise from your delivery partner to help you customise or integrate features using low code technologies and explore new innovations whenever you choose.

The flexibility of the Microsoft ecosystem makes it easy to implement new and disruptive technology, from speech analytics with naturallanguage processing, to automation and AI- enhanced analytics.

Contact Centre Vs A Traditional Contact Centre

Compared to a traditional contact centre, Microsoft Teams Connected contact centres offer infinitely more flexibility, scale, and freedom to growing companies. With Microsoft, you can combine your UCaaS and CCaaS environment in one place, align your teams, and expand your business at the pace that suits you.

Compared to a traditional contact centre, your Microsoft Teams contact centre offers:

Cost savings: Purchasing your contact centre functionality from a Microsoft Teams partner and aligning it with your existing UCaaS environment can lead to significant cost savings compared to a standard contact centre. Simply moving into the cloud with your contact centre will save you a significant amount of money on hardware provisioning, maintenance, and more. Plus, you can save money on training your team.

Collaboration: A Microsoft Teams contact centre places significant focus on the power of collaboration for modern teams. The backend is designed to bring people together through presence tools, video, instant chat and more. This means your entire team can work more effectively together when serving customers. You can even synchronise the various members of your team living in different parts of the world.

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Flexibility: Because the Microsoft Teams contact centre is based in the cloud, it’s easy to scale your operations according to your service demand levels and needs. You can provision new contact centre functionality quickly and there’s no limit to how far you can extend your contact centre around the globe with the right partner.

Ease of use: Microsoft Teams is a tool countless companies are already familiar with from a productivity, UC, and collaboration perspective. If your team members already know how to use Microsoft Teams for these purposes, the requirement for additional training will be minimal to ensure they can take advantage of contact centre features. You can build a full omnichannel environment your teams can track in one location, without the need to switch tools, and even integrate other valuable pieces of software.

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Productivity: Microsoft Teams naturally integrates with the existing tools of the Microsoft Office productivity suite, which many team members use every day. It can also link to a range of other tools like Salesforce and HubSpot, to give your agents more of the information they need to perform at their best wherever they are.

Innovation: Microsoft is committed to constantly expanding and enhancing the Microsoft Teams ecosystem with new tools and features. As the feature list for Microsoft Teams and its connected Contact Centre vendors continues to evolve, your contact centre will continue to become more extensive over time.

Work from anywhere: Thanks to Teams, agents can easily check information and collaborate with colleagues when on a call, which facilitates them to work effectively remotely.

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Managing Phone Numbers Within a Microsoft Teams Contact Centre

Phone numbers can be provided for Teams Contact Centres in 3 ways: Calling Plans, Operator Connect and Direct Routing.

01. Calling Plan

An all-in-the-cloud solution with Microsoft providing numbers and your PSTN carrier.

02. Operator Connect

A selected list of carriers in the Microsoft Operator Connect program, that will manage your Session Border Controller (SBC), provide your numbers and become your PSTN Carrier.

03. Direct Routing

Enables you to choose your own PSTN carrier by connecting your own hosted Session Border Controller(s) (SBC) or a partner hosted Direct Routing Platform.

Microsoft Teams partners can help you to port or transfer existing numbers from your existing phone carrier or service partner into the Microsoft Teams environment.

It is important to remember that “connect” model contact centres will only work with direct routing.

LEARN MORE ABOUT DIRECT ROUTING
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More About Microsoft Teams Contact Centre

We know Teams inside out and we partner with a carefully selected range of industry-leading Microsoft-certified cloud contact centre specialists to ensure we have a solution to suit all Teams Contact Centre use cases. This has given us significant experience in integrating contact centre and advanced routing with our Teams Direct Routing product, as well as other Microsoft Enterprise Voice solutions.

Find Out More
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How Resonate Can Help

Resonate is a leading Microsoft Teams partner and a certified partner of multiple industry-leading Teams contact centre specialists, such as Anywhere365 and Luware. We have years of experience integrating intelligent routing and contact centre solutions with our dedicated Voice for Teams direct routing platform, as well as a host of additional Microsoft Teams Enterprise Voice solutions.

Resonate can assist companies in building and managing the technology stack they need with their Microsoft Teams contact centre, with complete end-to-end solutions. We assist with everything from systems architecture and planning, through to integration and legacy systems removal. We can even help with user training and onboarding requirements.

Contact Resonate today to learn more about how we can help you leverage the power of Microsoft Teams contact centres.

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