More than 115 million people use daily Microsoft Teams as a collaboration and communication platform. It is a reliable solution which has proven to be live up with expectations, also in the enterprise environment.
This has led to an increasing interest of companies towards Teams and now CIOs and IT Managers are focusing on the opportunity to use Microsoft Teams as a platform to replace legacy phone systems and associated applications, providing remote working employees with a complete communication platform.
Should customers expect feature parity with a legacy PBX and contact center solution?
That’s now a trending topic in the business environment and of course, the answer to this question cannot be just yes or no. In this article, we will try to highlight threats and advantages of moving a contact center service to Microsoft Teams.
As per Microsoft statements on several occasions – Microsoft is leaving to third-party apps the advanced call management features required by a contact center. Natively Teams includes some basic call treatment functions like auto attendance, call queues, business hours, very basic dashboards, and analytics, which can be enough to fulfill the needs of SMBs or companies where incoming calls are managed just by a bunch of operators, using a few lines.
“For some companies, Microsoft Teams’ cloud voice capabilities, including auto-attendant and call queues, provide the features and configuration to meet their needs. For others who desire integrated solutions with business tools and workflows to drive the customer journey, Microsoft Teams also integrates with some of the industry’s leading Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solution providers” writes Microsoft in one the official integration page. In the latter case, the only type of contact center available to date is what Microsoft itself called a “connected contact center”.
Some of the main vendors on the market are developing connected contact center applications using Direct Routing to connect to the PSTN, and that’s for certain an advantage as this leaves customers the freedom to decide their preferred provider among the ones which offer Microsoft Teams certified SBCs.
Among the advantages, in terms of advanced added features this kind of contact center may add to Teams there is a series of not insignificant benefits, both from the operators’ and user experience point of view.
- Collaboration and customer service are hosted in the same Hub that manages the entire communications of the company – this maximizes efficiency and time loss. Some vendors – including Mida Solution- offer an integrated attendant console Microsoft Teams App, operators can use directly from the Teams window.
- Third-party applications can empower customer service with sophisticated dispatching algorithms, like basic round-robin, multiple queue skill-based routing. Calls coming from different sources like PSTN, Teams, Skype for Business, and others can be merged into common service queues.
- The customer journey and customer experience can be improved, as third-party apps can include more flexible Interactive voice responses that enterprises can customize to continue supporting their customers efficiently.
- The presence of the SBC allows integrating also other complementary UC applications, like for example a recording solution.
- Some connected contact center applications can integrate their data with Business Intelligence platforms. That is an enormous advantage for enterprises, as this allows them to generate analytics about their UC system, that can be available in different formats and can become part of the Global data asset of a company.
On the other hand, enterprises transferring Unified Communications from a legacy PBX to Teams, may pay attention to a few of aspects related to the interaction of the existing UC solution with other business applications and appliances. Also, not all connected contact center solutions guarantee a non-intrusive treatment of the conversations: this can reflect delays and degradation in the media path, to the detriment of the conversation quality and consequently of the customer experience.
If you want to find out more about this topic, you can watch this interview to Mauro Franchin, Mida Solutions CTO.
How Mida Solutions can help you
Get in touch with us directly to discover the advantages your customer service can have thanks to Mida C3 Cloud Contact Center for Microsoft Teams. We will be happy to answer your doubts and to help you define a smooth migration process to Microsoft Teams.