Customer expectations surrounding contact centers have evolved in recent years. 75% of customers expect consistent customer service across all channels, without compromising speed, efficiency, or personalization.
To meet these expectations, businesses need more than just a powerful contact center. They need a solution that allows them to unify teams, boost collaboration, and preserve conversational context. That’s where Microsoft Teams comes in.
This intuitive collaboration platform is at the heart of countless enterprise productivity strategies, offering access to comprehensive tools for collaboration and communication. Microsoft Teams has become the go-to work hub for endless businesses worldwide, unifying staff members around the world with video, chat, file sharing, and countless other tools. Integrating Teams with your contact center gives you the opportunity to bring your UCaaS and CCaaS technologies together.
In this article, we will review the three best contact center solutions for Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft Teams Contact Center Integrations
As companies search for ways to simplify workflows, boost productivity, and deliver consistent support to customers, Microsoft is empowering many digital transformation strategies. Through the Microsoft partner network, companies can access Teams-certified contact centers, which are designed to provide a native contact center solution within the Teams platform.
Teams-certified contact centers consolidate communication channels, empowering customer-facing agents to serve clients in a range of environments.
These contact centers unify voice, video, chat, and collaboration tools (such as screen and file-sharing solutions). In this way, they are able to increase agent efficiency and break down data silos. However, with dozens of certified partners to choose from, finding the right solution can be challenging.
Let’s examine three of the market leaders and how their contact center systems compare.
ComputerTalk’s ice Contact Center for Microsoft Teams
ComputerTalk was one of the first Microsoft partners to ever complete the Teams Connected Contact Center certification program. Their certified solution, “ice Contact Center”, has undergone comprehensive testing to guarantee reliability, security, and compliance.
ice Contact Center provides a fully native experience to agents and subject matter experts within the Teams environment.
“ice Contact Center enables companies to integrate with the entire Microsoft suite of products beyond just Teams. Companies can integrate Azure AI service, Azure storage, Power BI, and Dynamics with their contact center,” explains Jean-Nicolas Robitaille, VP of Product Experience at ComputerTalk. “This enables companies to leverage the capabilities of those applications in the contact center and use their Microsoft spending requirements.”
With ComputerTalk, companies get:
- Enhanced collaboration: ice Contact Center is a PBX agnostic solution, that supports agents on any device, from any location. It even supports non-Teams users with legacy PBX solutions and a native softphone.
- Omnichannel interactions: With ice, companies can reach customers through voice, web chat, social media, intelligent chatbots, email, and countless other channels.
- Reliability: With the ice ecosystem, companies can continue to receive and answer calls, even when Microsoft Teams goes down, minimizing the risk of disruptions, thanks to built-in failover and redundancy mechanisms.
- Powerful reporting: Users can access in-depth real-time performance monitoring and historical reporting tools, with information on queues, users, teams, contacts and more.
- Monitoring: ice can deliver actionable alerts from iceMonitor to Teams channels, notifying both supervisors and users of potential issues.
- Workflow management: The ice Workflow designer empowers companies to build custom applications that transform interactions with customers and streamline routing processes.
- Exceptional security: ComputerTalk is SOC 2 Type 2, PCI DSS, and HIPAA compliant, ensuring complete data security and protection.
- Endless extensibility: ice Contact Center comes packaged with dozens of pre-built connectors to CRMs, workforce management, ticketing systems and more.
- Contact handling toolbar: The solution can be configured to help agents rapidly find subject matter experts and transfer calls outside of the contact center.
- Customer insights: With integrated recording and transcripts, companies can improve training, access valuable data, and stay compliant. The ice contact center even allows companies to automate surveys for CSAT (Customer Satisfaction score) and NPS (Net Promoter Score) insights.
- Outbound dialer: Unlike most contact center integrations for Microsoft Teams, ice also has an automatic outbound dialing solution to maximize productivity.
- AI: ice Contact Center comes with a number of AI solutions such as bots, transcription, and analytics.
RingCentral Contact Center for Microsoft Teams
RingCentral offers direct routing and an embedded contact center app for Microsoft Teams. The app adds RingCentral’s cloud PBX capabilities into the Teams ecosystem for a native and global solution. Some features include:
- Advanced analytics: Analytical tools for building custom reports from templates, without the need for PowerBI licenses from Microsoft.
- Calling tools: Heads-up displays, call queue management, whisper, monitor, and barge-in options for business leaders and supervisors.
- Call controls: Advanced call capabilities such as transfer, record, park, and flip.
- Omnichannel options: Phone, SMS, and fax capabilities, alongside the messaging options and chatbot integrations within Teams.
- Collaboration features: Users can combine RingCentral and Microsoft contact directories in Teams and automatically sync presence information.
- Integrations: RingCentral’s contact center for Teams integrates easily with a range of solutions, including Salesforce, HubSpot, and ServiceNow.
8×8 Contact Center for Microsoft Teams
Similar to RingCentral, 8×8 offers a dedicated app for Microsoft Teams, which embeds PBX functionality into the collaboration platform. The PBX-to-PBX integration creates a seamless experience for users, with access to a range of features, such as:
- Omnichannel handling: Manage conversations across a range of channels within Teams, improving customer experience and resolution times.
- Quality management: Integrated quality management tools with speech and text analytics, as well as 8×8 recording features.
- Routing: Leverage skills-based routing to connect consumers with the right service based on Teams user presence.
- Global connectivity: 8×8 offers unlimited voice calling capabilities in 48 countries, ensuring companies can expand across geographical borders.
- IVR: Access intelligent interactive voice response solutions to help customers navigate your contact center.
- Integrations: The 8×8 contact center can connect with a range of valuable business tools, including Dynamics 365, Zendesk, and Salesforce.
- Collaboration: Instant access to real-time expert presence within Teams, and comprehensive directories for contact management.
ComputerTalk vs RingCentral vs 8×8: Which is Best
While all three of the contact center solutions for Microsoft Teams offer a convenient, native solution for Teams CX, there are some major differences. ComputerTalk is the only vendor to go above and beyond the basic contact center experience within Teams, offering access to comprehensive workflow management, and state-of-the-art omnichannel capabilities.
ComputerTalk’s ice Contact Center also offers advanced reporting and analytics, real-time alerts for supervisors, and a comprehensive “iceBar” solution to help agents reach subject matter experts, and transfer interactions instantly.
