Microsoft Teams: the latest updates - March 2023
Microsoft takes care to always enhance the user experience of its communication and collaboration experience in Microsoft Teams. Keeping up with these periodic updates to be even more efficient by using this powerful ecosystem is not an easy task. So, let’s go through the most important ones to let you understand how to increase your efficiency within this platform.
Here is a brief summary:
MEETINGS
- Targeted notifications - During meetings, special alerts can be sent to specific participants through a bot. These notifications are private and they are visible as a pop-up on the screen.
- Explicit recording consent - Microsoft Teams now supports the option to expressly ask for the consent of all the meeting attendees to record the online event. Only with their consent the voice and video can be captured. This new feature is important to meet specific privacy regulations.
- Magnify PowerPoint Live Presentations - When PowerPoint Live slides are presented, each attendee can now privately zoom in on the shared content. It allows the person to better read the shared information. There is also a “Sync to presenter” button to resume following the presenter.
CHATS
- @mention new options - As to mention a person in the chat, now it is possible to type “everyone” after @ to send a notification to all the group members to convey a specific message. According to recipient notification settings, he will receive it to be alerted of messages in which they are involved.
Furthermore, in a group chat, by using @ and typing the name of the contact it is possible to quickly add him as a new participant.
- Improved profile cards - In the previous updates, Microsoft released an integration with LinkedIn that allows a fast connection between the contact information in the chat and his social network profile. Being aware of the importance of having a contact background, Microsoft has made available additional details about a teammate in Teams. For instance, it is visible pending meeting invites or birthdays.
- Download file location - Users can choose their preferred location where the file downloaded from Microsoft Teams chats can be stored. This option makes it easier to find download files.
CALLS
- Busy-on-busy call feature - When a person is busy in a call or meeting, he can set up better incoming call management. In his Microsoft Teams settings, new multiple choices will be available for handling these calls, such as “play a busy signal” or “redirect call”. This feature can be customized by administrators and end users.
Stay tuned to read through our article the future Microsoft Teams updates. Meanwhile, discover how our UC solutions can help you improve your communications within Microsoft Teams.
Why is flexibility essential for your contact center?
Choosing the right UC system for your customer service is a priority. Streamlining agents’ workflow allows them to better perform and consequently deliver high-quality support.
In a fast-transforming digital landscape, it is essential to empower employees with an advanced toolkit to deal with the most complex issues and the most sensitive conversations. They should be able to seamlessly assist customers’ requests. Resolving them in a quick and efficient manner increases people's satisfaction. They will enjoy the company's service. Consequently, the adopted solution should be flexible enough to meet customers' and agents’ needs.
Flexibility is a really appealing feature of this UC solution. It comes behind the mere meaning of this word. It gathers different crucial aspects to be considered when you are evaluating a contact center. Let’s go deeper into them.
Why is flexibility a key aspect of modern customer service?
- Accessibility - The hybrid working approach is a scenario that is here to stay and the company should face it with the right UC solution. The contact center tool you are evaluating should ensure this seatless aspect. It needs to be accessible from any location in the Cloud by multiple users just by using their credentials. Furthermore, a unique interface with centralized management and conversation history should be provided.
- Turnkey all-in-one system - Your new contact center solution should include easy-to-use full-featured cloud-based UC applications, such as attendant console, compliance recorder, queue management system, and IVR. It should be also integrated with your CRM system and other business processes to decrease the time wasted by your agents to jump from one tool to another. In this way, all your agents need to smoothly carry out their daily operations is well incorporated in a unique environment, such as Microsoft Teams. Consequently, it lets them be more productive.
- Multi-channel approach - A modern advanced contact center should allow companies to provide multi-channel support letting customers interact with your team across different methods (e.g. calls, chats, emails). The platform your agents should rely on needs to be flexible to collect information from different sources and make it available in the same unified ecosystem, such as Microsoft Teams. As a result, a consistent customer experience is ensured because your agents have all customer information at hand.
- Gradual migration to the Cloud - The solution you are selecting should be flexible enough to guarantee a progressive swift of your Unified Communications from legacy systems to the Cloud. For many reasons, such as financial and organizational requirements, you can prefer to adopt a contact center that grants the coexistence of legacy and cloud technologies. This flexible aspect can be crucial in your evaluation process because it lets gradually scale up licenses and defer migration costs.
- Easy scalability - Your new contact center should be adequately flexible to evolve with your business scenario. It should follow both the growth of your company, the evolution of the market and also meet your customers’ demands. In other words, you should select a UC solution that can be activated with an “as a service” licensing model to allow you to decrease service inefficiencies. In other words, with this approach, you can easily add and remove licenses as required as well as pay only for what your agents really need and use.
Give agents the flexibility they need to provide a top-quality service by adopting the right toolkit. Discover more about our flexible solution, Mida C3 - Cloud Contact Center here. It combines all the highlighted aspects.
Main pros of a multi-channel support
Providing satisfactory customer service makes a difference in your business growth. How people's conversations are managed plays a crucial role in customer experience. In other words, fulfilled support positively impacts decision processes. People are likely to purchase again from companies that offer a five-star service.
Consequently, it is important to keep in mind how your customer service is organized to handle requests as well as choosing advanced Unified Communications solutions that support it. Your workplace should be efficiently organized to let employees provide the best service ever.
What are people looking for now?
Nowadays, people are accustomed to communicating with companies through different online channels, from traditional calls, live chats, emails, social media, and more.
This means digital interactions are currently dominant. Customers are accustomed to using three or four different channels to contact a company. Their expectations have increased over time. They don’t like to explain their request twice or wait too long to get an ultimate answer. Therefore, ensuring the option to choose different methods to interact is an added value for your customers.
What are the main pros of a multi-channel contact center?
Stop offering siloed channels that sound inefficient for your customers. You should keep up with current customers’ behavior and preferences and rely on an advanced cloud-based contact center solution to guarantee a multi-channel contact approach. It is a key differentiator that should not be underestimated. It will bring several advantages both for you and your customers.
PROS FOR YOUR COMPANY:
- Seatless scenario - With this advanced contact center, such as the Mida one, your agents can provide a wide range of support methods from anywhere. They just need a connection: with their credentials, your employees can access the solution and easily handle all corporate conversations. What they need to manage them is at their fingertips. They don’t have to jump from one platform to another. This means they are empowered to be efficient.
- Single view of the customer information - The big challenge of this approach is to offer unified support. In this scenario, customer details and business data should not be lost across the involved business channels and they should be efficiently coordinated in a unique ecosystem. Relying on an advanced contact center, like Mida’s one, these aspects are ensured. The solution is integrated with your CRM tool and other business systems that deal with these aspects. They are well-organized and incorporated in the same environment, such as Microsoft Teams.
- Increased productivity - By relying on different channels, people can contact you as they prefer and simple requests can be quickly handled through immediate sources, such as chats with automated messages. Consequently, just complex requests are handled by an agent through a voice conversation. In other words, the number of calls is reduced and the burden on your employees is decreased too. Thus, both your agents and service efficiencies are boosted.
PROS FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS:
- Wide options to contact you - By providing multi-channel support, you allow customers to avoid boring calls and choose the most comfortable channel at each moment to get the quickest answer. This approach will raise the company’s perception because it lets you meet people's support needs.
- Fast support - Thanks to this approach, automated messages can quickly nip simple queries and your customers can enjoy this timeliness service. It is now clear that live chats have the highest satisfaction level due to their prompt response. People can contact you every day, all day by relying on these automated answers.
- Enhanced brand image - By offering support through different channels, you convey the message that your organization is customer-centric. The needs of your customers are considered and efficiently met. This makes them feel satisfied and understood. They can enjoy the experience with your company.
Does it seem appealing to you?
Mida’s contact center could be your choice to engage with your customers in this way. Go deeper into this topic by visiting this page.
Enterprise Connect: why meet us at booth 335?
The enterprise IT community is going to gather to share opinions about the latest technologies and solutions in the UC market in Orlando, FL.
Are you among the attendees of Enterprise Connect 2023 to get a glimpse of what’s new?
Don’t make commitments, this international conference will take place at Gaylord Palms on March, 27th-30th.
As in the previous edition, we are an exhibitor to present our advanced UC solutions - including contact center, attendant console, and compliance recorder - for Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
Register now with our promo code MIDA
to SAVE $500 on your conference pass (here).
Why attend this event?
It is a powerful opportunity to network with new acquaintances, meet partners and explore the valuable suggestions from market experts on how to take the most from communication and collaboration solutions in the Cloud.
Why meet us?
Are you an end-user, a service provider, or a system integrator? Seize the chance to discuss with our Managers your corporate requirements. Our professional attendant console and compliance recorder are suitable for any company’s needs.
They will be glad to highlight the best practices to empower customer service agents by adopting advanced communications solutions. Nowadays, it is essential to point out the key role of providing multi-channel support.
We are waiting for you at booth #335.
How to gradually migrate UC to the Cloud?
The new era of corporate communications has already begun: digital interactions are widely part of the business environment. Organizations are aware of the pros of moving their legacy system to the Cloud but how to efficiently handle this transition? Is it possible to do it step by step?
Often this migration is not an easy process and there is fuzzy knowledge about this topic. Let’s shed some light on this shift because only a few people know that it is possible to carry it out gradually. In other words, companies can partially maintain their current analog telephony system and progressively cross this path to cloud-based ecosystems, such as Microsoft Teams and Zoom.
Many entities, that are willing to begin this upgrading process, are not ready enough to completely migrate their UC to the Cloud, for many reasons, among which are financial and operational aspects. Having deeply understood this scenario, Mida proposes a transition approach with a step ahead. Now available is a new architecture flexible enough to guarantee the coexistence of legacy technologies and Microsoft Teams or Zoom, in the same environment.
It is the ideal solution for companies, including the biggest ones, that want to defer the transitioning costs. The initial investment is contained as a result of maintaining some legacy phones and only switching bit by bit some extensions to the Cloud. The transition is progressive. This means these technologies can synergistically cohabit by combining the simplicity of the cloud-based solutions with the analog system. Corporate communications between PSTN, legacy, and digital extensions can be handled with Mida’s UC suite.
Furthermore, this smooth transition is very attractive also considering that it involves turnkey solutions. Mida’s UC offering, which includes contact center, attendant console, and compliance recorder, is easy to activate and simple to configure. These elements are essential to accompany companies to optimally face this change.
To sum up, companies can decide how to move to the Cloud in accordance with companies' business requirements. Does it sound appealing to you? Speak with our experts now to gradually move to the Cloud.
How to satisfy customers by relying on Microsoft Teams-certified UC solutions?
Exceed customers’ expectations by choosing a contact center and a compliance recorder certified by Microsoft Teams to provide excellent service. Adopting these two applications is a successful choice to make your customers more satisfied with your support. A top quality level and a high secure grade are ensured by the certification. Each of these solutions has been tested to verify that Microsoft’s standards are respected. Thus the accreditation lets companies be thoughtless about the adopted communication tool. They can rely on an advanced professional solution to ensure astonishing support.
What does the user expect from Mida’s certified solutions?
Mida decided to certify its contact center and compliance recorder to add extra value to these solutions. The main aim is to provide a complete advanced suite of certified UC solutions to companies seeking for moving their corporate communications to the Microsoft Teams environment. These solutions guarantee several different pros:
CONTACT CENTER
With this UC solution, Microsoft Teams users can rely on advanced call management features that augment and enhance the basic Teams calling functions. A Teams-like user experience allows agents to become faster familiar with the solution: there are no disruptive elements in the UX. All is well-organized and intuitive like in Teams.
Mida C3 - Cloud Contact Center has been designed to streamline agents' activities and increase service productivity with an all-in-one suite of solutions:
- It is cloud-based, it just needs a browser to use it
- Its setup is simple and fast to let users quickly use the solution
- It is integrated with the main CRMs to increase the smooth management of requests.
- It is a complete UC suite that includes attendant console, queue management, IVR & automated attendant, and compliance recorder. Managers can choose what to adopt according to their specific needs.
COMPLIANCE RECORDER
Mida’s professional recording solution allows companies to collect and archive and listen to Teams-to-Teams conversations and interactions between PSTN and Teams and vice versa. This solution lets companies securely record communications according to international and national privacy and security laws (e.g. GDPR and MiFID II) and corporate policies and practices. This recorder is flexible enough to be compliant with both external and internal requirements.
It means, with Mida’s compliance recorder, conversations, and their metadata, are safely stored in the preferred storage in the same country where conversations are made for a specific amount of time. The retention period is easily settable to keep communications archived just for the time companies are entitled to store the file.
A high level of security is also ensured by file compression, encryption, and marking proof against tampering threats.
Why did Mida decide to invest in this certification?
As a company with +18 years of experience in the UC market and with an innovative approach, Mida felt the emerging need of the market of adopting new cutting-edge technology, such as Microsoft Teams, for communications handling long before the Pandemic. Mida decided to quickly work on a complete suite of UC solutions for Microsoft Teams to empower companies to provide satisfactory customer service within this cloud-based platform. Grasping the increasing demand for these solutions the next step could not only have been to enter into the Microsoft Teams certification program. This accreditation confirms the successful decision to invest in this popular technology. Mida has been the first Italian company to achieve this goal by certifying its contact center and compliance recorder.
Would you like to know more about our certified offering? Ask for a demo here, one of our experts will be back to you shortly.
3 key benefits of UCaaS for any company, including yours
Companies worldwide are seeking to move their corporate communications to the Cloud by adopting UC applications that completely fit their business needs. Choosing these solutions is not an easy and immediate decision but one aspect is clear: any entity can benefit from selecting UC solutions as a Service (UCaaS). Let’s go deeper into the main advantages of this increasingly required pay-per-use licensing approach.
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Subscription-based services in the Cloud
Firstly, by paying a monthly fee, enterprises easily activate the licenses of the UC solutions they need to efficiently manage business communication. This means employees have direct simple access to the solutions from any location in the Cloud with their credentials and the company pays just for what they use.
Furthermore, companies are allowed to personalize their cloud-based UC system with their preferred applications. All they need, such as voice and video applications and messaging solutions, are included in a system provided and handled by Service Providers and System Integrators. In other words, no additional aspects are required to get advanced UC features.
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Hand-off maintenance
The “as a Service approach” offloads maintenance, upgradings, security, and implementation to the provider of these solutions who oversees all these system aspects. Companies no longer have to worry about having a dedicated team that only deals with them. Thanks to UCaaS, the solutions are ready to use as well as companies only activate a license to immediately use them.
Consequently, this model makes UC solutions more accessible for enterprises because it is the easier, quicker, and simpler approach they can choose to shift their communications to the Cloud. In brief, it is a time-saving approach: solutions are provided as turnkey up-to-date UC applications on a single platform. Employees are empowered to easily use them in their day-to-day activities.
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Cost-saving, scalability, and efficiency
Since companies pay just for what they use, UCaaS is an ideal adoption model for unpredictable markets and growing businesses. By relying on it, entities are allowed to rapidly increase or decrease the number of licenses they need as well as add or remove applications in the subscription. Thus service inefficiencies are avoided and entities can take the most from the UC solutions they have activated.
Furthermore, it is important to consider that with this method no hardware costs are required as in the on-prem infrastructure. With a perpetual license and a high initial investment, on-premises systems do not allow such a scalable and efficient scenario, typical of the UCaaS model.
Do you still have doubts about UCaaS and its benefits?
Discuss this approach with our experts. They will highlight the main pros according to your needs and show you our as a Service offering.
Why choose a Microsoft Teams-Certified UC solution?
What does choosing Microsoft Teams-certified UC solutions for customer service really mean? Marco Cortese, Mida's President and Sales Manager, has been recently interviewed by UC Today, the leading online publication for Unified Communications and Collaboration news, to shed light on this topic by explaining the main advantages of this choice. Let’s summarize the key points of the video.
Firstly, Marco Cortese notes that these years Microsoft has completely changed how people communicate and collaborate by proposing a UC platform that supports a remote and hybrid work scenario. Already during the Covid-19 Pandemic, managers have understood that these new habits are here to stay and they have chosen Microsoft Teams to handle interactions. Microsoft Teams has been adopted as a new corporate communication system, bringing the need to integrate third-party solutions in the same environment.
Nowadays, it is increasingly apparent how this integrated approach helps to increase customer satisfaction: it helps increase agents’ productivity by decreasing the wasted time spent on moving from one application to another. That’s why many companies choose this complete ecosystem with its integrations like UC-certified solutions.
Secondly, Mida’s President states that enterprises prefer certified solutions, because the high standards of security and quality of Microsoft are guaranteed by this accreditation. This certification adds value to these applications which companies could count on for their services. It is evidence of how these applications work within the Microsoft ecosystem.
Then the interview goes through Mida’s certified contact center and compliance recorder to highlight the main reasons why decision-makers should adopt these certified solutions, instead of non-certified ones, and why Mida chose to invest in this certification.
Go deeper into this topic by watching the interview.
Mida C3 with a step ahead: what's new?
A new version of Mida C3 - Cloud Contact Center is now available to boost your communications. Your employees will love its updated aspects and its new key integrations: they can now rely on a new intuitive tab for chat and email management and a higher level of security. Thanks to the LDAPS protocol and the OAuth standard for Zoom, user authentication security has been implemented.
This release is characterized by the integration with WhatsApp and email applications to allow your customer service team to provide top-quality support through different channels. Agents can now smoothly solve requests coming from chats, emails, and calls by counting on an easy and professional user interface.
What to expect from this release?
Let’s discover the main points your team will enjoy about the new version of Mida C3:
- Messages are recorded to allow agents to have the whole conversation within this unique tab. Your employees become quickly familiar with this new release thanks to the similar user experience among Mida’s applications.
- Messages are routed through distribution algorithms to agents logged into the queues. They are advised of the new incoming conversation and they can easily accept or decline to handle it.
- A first automatic welcome message is foreseen in this release: it can be set up to streamline the chat handling process. The management of these conversations is intuitive to enhance the user experience. This approach allows agents to focus their attention just on the requests.
- All these activities can be done directly through the new professional tab that has been designed to make the handling process easier. It is well organized into three main areas on the screen:
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- on the left, the user can see the conversations list and can be immediately aware of the number of unread messages;
- in the middle, the agent reads the entire selected conversations and directly answers them;
- on the top right corner, a setting menu allows the user to customize options, select the preferred shortcuts, and log in and log out from the queue assigned and log out from the system.
Do you want to know more about this release?
Discover how it can help improve your customer service by getting in touch with us here. We will back to you in a flash with more information.
Why should you adopt a compliance recorder?
Before analyzing the main reasons why you should invest in a compliance recorder for your customer service department, let’s shed light on what it is. You may have already heard about this type of recording system but probably it is not so clear the relevance of adopting it instead of a recorder that is not compliant.
A recorder is compliant when it allows collecting conversations legally meeting the latest international and national laws about privacy and security (e.g. GDPR and MiFID II). It may be required to store conversations for a certain period of time in the same country where they are made and then deleted. This recorder makes it possible.
It also ensures secure archiving through file encryption, file marking proof against tampering threats, and customizable file access.
The process of capturing conversations should meet all the laws of the areas of the parties involved. Regulations change from country to country and state to state. In the US, for example, it is allowed to record calls as long as one party permits it, but in other countries, both parties' recording consensus is required before the recording starts. It's the responsibility of companies to keep up with these regulations and practices.
Certain markets have their specific recording requirements related to the nature of the data involved in the conversations. This regulatory compliance affects for example the finance and the healthcare environments.
In addition to these external regulations, companies should also internally want conversations to be reliably recorded and securely stored in their preferred storage. Both company representatives and sales departments can benefit from archiving conversations because it allows them to collect valuable information which helps to ensure a high-quality service (find out why it is so important here). This implies adopting a recorder that is flexible enough to adhere also to these specific internal policies, which are called “corporate compliance”.
Related to this topic, it is also important to highlight that most communication and collaboration native recorder does not comply with the necessary regulations for some industries. To securely archive them fulfilling these requirements, companies need to adopt a third-party compliance recording system integrated with these platforms. This increases the spread of requests for this UC solution.
Being sure to respect the recording requirements is an essential aspect to keep in mind because steep fines are provided for those who violate these laws. In case of litigation and external investigations, companies should provide evidence of having recorded just the conversations they are entitled to store. For this reason, a periodical verification of the recordings, through dedicated analytics solutions, should be considered by managers. It helps companies prepare for compliance audits by:
- being on alert for any potential risks and preventing them,
- improving breach risk management processes to promptly rectify them in case of violation.
Would you like to adopt this recorder? Contact our experts, they will explain to you the main features that best address your needs and they show you how it works.