The Microsoft Teams collaboration app has quickly emerged as the go-to solution for businesses in search of an all-in-one environment for communication and collaboration. This year, at the Microsoft Ignite conference, the leading technology brand announced a host of exciting new updates to the Teams portfolio, including the upcoming release of calling APIs.
Landis Technologies, a Microsoft Gold partner with more than 20 years of experience in providing UC, IT, and Dynamics support for leading brands, is keen to take advantage of these new APIs. Since the concept of Microsoft calling APIs was first introduced in 2018, Landis Technologies has been in the background, building an immersive contact centre solution for companies that want to combine their UC environment with a Microsoft Teams accessible contact centre.
I caught up with Matthew Landis, the CEO of Landis Technologies, to talk about where Landis will be going next with the arrival of Microsoft Teams Calling APIs.
Tell Us About the Landis Contact Center for Microsoft Teams?
With Microsoft calling APIs set to drop “very soon,” Landis Technologies has been able to enter the preview stage of delivering its new contact centre solution. The Landis Contact Center for Microsoft Teams is currently being tested by select customers in the Landis community, with a general release date in the near future.
The contact centre solution for Microsoft Teams from Landis is built on the company’s value pillars of simplicity, familiarity, powerful experiences, connectivity, and trust. Matt told me that one of the things that Landis is really focused on is making the contact centre very simple and easy to buy, set up, configure, and use.
“We have people setting up the contact centre service and call queues in a matter of minutes”
What’s more, the experience is familiar too – it’s going to look identical to Microsoft Teams. We think that you should have a seamless experience as you move between Microsoft Teams and your contact centre. We don’t want customers to have to re-learn what different icons and systems look like.”
On top of delivering an experience that’s simple and familiar, Landis is also concentrating on providing a powerful set of features so that users can deliver great customer experiences. “We’re unique among vendors because we focus on Microsoft Teams and that’s it. We can give you access to features like managers viewing live calls, barge-in, call recording, wallboards, sentiment analysis and so on. We’re also connecting with things like Microsoft Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI so that companies can implement additional features through those solutions too.”
Finally, Landis told me that the Contact Center solution is designed to be “trusted.” As soon as you log in, the experience just works.
How Will You Be Delivering New Features to the Market?
The preview stage of the Landis Contact Center for Microsoft Teams is already underway with a few select customers, and Matt told me that the business is working on bringing out new features as quickly as possible. As Microsoft rolls out new capabilities through its calling APIs, Landis will be aiming to follow on the company’s heels as quickly as possible.
“When the APIs for calling were first introduced at Ignite 2018, we were right there demonstrating call queues utilising the Calling APIs, during the same Ignite conference. We’re always walking very closely behind Microsoft when it comes to delivering new feature options”
Going forward, Landis Technologies will be taking is Contact Center to the market in a multi-pronged strategy. In the past, the business promoted partners very heavily. “We have pushed our customers towards the right partners for their needs. We’re also going to be working through the Microsoft seller platform going forward too.”
Though the Contact Center will be starting in the US, Landis is planning on going global with the offering as quickly as possible. “We can already see hot spot opportunities in Europe, APAC, and the Americas.”
What’s Next for the Contact Center Offering?
I was keen to find out what was coming next for Landis once the company’s preview stage came to an end. During the preview, Landis is focusing on making sure that it is giving everyone an incredibly simple and straightforward experience. Once the company sees that everything is running smoothly, the next stage is to make the Landis Contact Center for Microsoft Teams generally available.
“We’re hoping that we can deliver general availability when the calling API from Microsoft becomes generally available – so it shouldn’t be very long from now. We think that 2020 is going to be a huge year for us. When we rolled out the tenant console in 2014, we thought that there was a huge amount of demand for the service we were offering. Now there seems to be even more demand for this new solution for Microsoft Teams.”
Landis believes that its offering will be a significant solution for the market with between 1 and 500 agents going forward, and they’re planning to develop the dervice for a global scale. Now that companies can buy Microsoft Teams and develop a full internal communication system for very little money, the Landis solution will be an excellent accompanying technology for those who want to access a contact centre via Microsoft Teams too.
