With a partnership history of more than a decade, Enghouse has seen many evolutionary shifts take place at Microsoft, particularly regarding their digital collaboration tools. From OCS to Lync to Skype For Business, Enghouse has always sought to align its contact centre offerings with Microsoft’s platforms and offer their customers the best tools for delivering excellence to their users. This close partnership has always enabled the most frictionless path to upgrade for existing users.
We spoke to John Cray, VP, Product Management at Enghouse Interactive, about what Enghouse customers can look forward to, thanks to the latest developments at Microsoft, and the benefits of migration.
“We are really excited about the opportunities that lie head through our collaboration with Microsoft. We can now offer our customers cloud and on-premises contact centre options for Microsoft Teams including voice integration”
“This can be done through Enghouse Cloud, which provides Contact Center as a Service (CCaS) and Enghouse Interactive Communications Center (CC) V11.0, which supports on-premises or private cloud. Both of these solutions enable full handling of voice interactions in a Microsoft Teams environment. We are also part of Microsoft’s Technology Adoption Program (TAP), which gives us early access to their APIs”, he explained — a relationship which has helped in the past to bring contact centre functionality like recording, right into Microsoft’s products.
Close partnership, for integration and planning
“It gives us the ability to discuss roadmaps with them in both directions, so as they influence our roadmap, we also provide feedback in terms of features and API functions. We’ve been proud to present our solutions alongside Microsoft at various conferences, partner events and webinars. We also try to work closely with their Field Sales Team to get them on board with our solutions.
“We have also just been notified that we’re going to be part of their Teams Certification Program” — which means even deeper integration and endorsement of Enghouse’s contact centre solutions. Our integration allows calls to be routed intelligently to agents, and then when the agent takes the call, they’re actually using Teams to accept and control it”.
With over 600 customers presently on Skype-for-Business, Enghouse is currently piloting Teams migration with selected partners and customers, and looks forward to making it easy and seamless for all users who wish to make the move.
From Skype-for-Business to Teams
As Cray continued, “It’s a natural evolutionary step.
“They don’t have to change context on our platforms, they can just stay with us, and move into the world of Teams… And share documents, share information, join meetings together, video conferences… With that collaborative capability within teams, you get the best of both worlds”.
Collaboration is fundamental, not only to the way teams of agents interact, but also to how they resolve queries for enquirers, using the Teams framework. Being able to access their colleagues and collective knowledge in-the-moment enables them to better serve all those making enquiries, in new and effective ways: “The benefits of this collaboration for the end customer is that a higher percentage of interactions have a successful conclusion. You don’t have to get back to them, you can solve their problems on the first go”
Of course, that’s just one of the metrics which concern contact centre managers, but the integration between Enghouse and Teams makes it easy to keep everything on track, and hold each party to account.
As Cray elaborated, “You’ll make sure you’re delivering the service levels that you’ve committed to your customers because you’ll see in real time how you’re operating, through embedded analytics – to measure the performance of the contact centre environment.” This enables rapid course correction when needed,
“If something is not going well, you’ll have a set of actions that are defined for you to take, all as part of the embedded experience within the Teams environment”
So, the future for Enghouse and Teams is close collaboration, and both their customers and their customers’ customers will be seeing the benefits of this natural evolution very soon.
