With demand for Microsoft Teams technology continuing to grow in today’s digital-first world, the number of contact centre solutions available for modern teams is multiplying. When Microsoft Teams first began to take the world by storm, it quickly earned its stripes as a valuable UCaaS solution, connecting teams in every environment with state-of-the-art collaboration features.
Now, as companies become increasingly distributed, and search for the most convenient tools for end-to-end communications, Microsoft Teams is quickly emerging as an excellent CCaaS solution too. The question for modern business leaders is, with multiple Teams CCaaS vendors now available on the market, how do you choose the right option?
Here are some points to consider when you’re looking for your Microsoft Teams contact centre.
Step 1: Start with the Basics
The first step in choosing your Microsoft Teams contact centre is making sure you cover the basics. Just because you’re investing in a solution designed to work with Microsoft Teams, doesn’t mean you should be overlooking the most important elements of any CCaaS investment. When making a shortlist of contenders, look at:
- Voice and video quality: What kind of communication quality can you expect, and how does your contact centre provider ensure that this remains consistent? What sort of failover and redundancy techniques are in place to ensure reliability?
- Reach: Your contact centre solution needs to be accessible in all the environments where you’re going to be interacting with customers. Ensure your vendor has a geographical presence and data centre in the spaces that suit you.
- Security: Microsoft Teams is already built with security in mind, but your contact centre provider can offer additional support to help protect your team. Look for encryption for work-from-home employees, and specialist technology to help minimise the risk of fraud or ensure compliance with industry standards.
Step 2: Know Your Must-Haves
Outside of voice quality, global scale, and security, you’re going to have several specific “must-haves” for your contact centre. For instance, today’s companies need an Omni-channel contact centre environment to support clients wherever they are. Find out whether your contact centre vendor can align you with your customers on any channel before you sign up for anything.
Other must-have requirements might include things like a full administration panel where you can assign roles to various members of staff and roll out software patches quickly and easily from anywhere. The ability to support your employees wherever they are is growing increasingly important in an age of remote and hybrid work in the contact centre.
Remember, don’t just consider the contact centre features you need now, but the ones you may need in the future too. For instance, you might want to implement self-service solutions for your customers down-the-line, to reduce the pressure on your teams.
Step 3: Explore the Microsoft Integration
A true Microsoft Teams contact centre doesn’t just add contact centre functionality on top of the Teams ecosystem. The experience should feel fully native and integrated, so teams can work as efficiently and productively as possible from a single pane of glass.
For a lot of companies, this will mean creating a complete contact centre environment within Teams, complete with access to directories and sales tools, customer relationship management systems, and other valuable integrations to enable your agents.
Look at how well your vendor can adjust your contact centre environment to suit your specific needs. Can they deliver off-the-shelf integrations for Microsoft Teams along with APIs and specially-designed connections with your legacy tools? How well does everything work together once your contact centre is aligned?
Step 4: Consider Special Requirements
Microsoft Teams is a highly flexible environment, which is part of what makes it so appealing as both a UCaaS and CCaaS solution. The right Teams contact centre vendor will be able to leverage this flexibility to suit specific needs. When choosing your vendor, think about whether any special requirements might influence your contact centre decisions. For instance, do you have pre-existing hardware you want your teams to continue using with your new software?
Do you have specific compliance requirements, and therefore need to control where your data is stored, and how it’s managed on the backend of your Microsoft Teams environment? If you have specific needs, it’s best to contact your vendor and ask any questions you might have ahead of time. This will help you to determine just how customisable your contact centre might be.
Remember to look for the flexibility to adjust your contact centre system as your company evolves and changes too. Over time, your needs may change, and your vendor should be able to adapt accordingly, implementing new features whenever you choose.
Step 5: Know Your “Added Extras”
There are a lot of complementary tools for the contact centre which can also work seamlessly with Microsoft Teams. These tools can be extremely useful in a range of contact centre environments. For instance, if you’re running a hybrid workplace, you might want to implement workforce management and optimisation tools into the Teams ecosystem. Your vendor should be able to implement these tools for you, either using proprietary technology, or integrations.
If you have specific requirements regarding reporting and recording, ask whether your contact centre vendor can offer things like compliance recording using Microsoft’s unique APIs and SDKs? How will you control where those recordings are stored, and which information is kept private to ensure you’re compliant with industry standards?
You might even want to look specifically at CCaaS vendors with specialist skills in the implementation of various disruptive new tools, like Artificial Intelligence for agent support, coaching, sentiment analysis, and intelligent routing.
Choosing a Microsoft Teams contact centre vendor is a lot like choosing any contact centre solution. Start with the steps above and remember to consider the relationship between your vendor and the Microsoft ecosystem. A vendor with extensive experience partnering with Microsoft will be able to help you take full advantage of the Teams technology.
