The business world as we know it today is changing at a phenomenal rate. Hybrid and remote work has become commonplace among organizations of all sizes. Digital transformation is driving demand for more intuitive tools for boosting business productivity. At the same time, companies are becoming increasingly customer-focused, in a world where CX is essential to success.
CX now drives more than two-thirds of customer loyalty (more than price and brand combined). To thrive in this new landscape, organisations are rapidly shifting processes and tools into the cloud, focusing on crucial goals like scalability, and agility. At the time, countless successful brands have discovered new opportunities in the convergence of critical cloud platforms.
Bringing Unified Communications, and Customer Experience tools together, doesn’t just help to consolidate and simplify the modern business technology stack. It also assists businesses in improving employee experience, aligning data for better business decisions, enhancing collaboration, and effectively boosting customer experience.
Here’s why UC solutions like Microsoft Teams are increasingly converging with the world of the contact centre.
The Evolving Role of Contact Centre Tools in Teams
The merger of UC and contact centre solutions is now a global trend in the business landscape. Major market vendors across the globe are beginning to offer companies more opportunities to align their cloud technologies in a single pane of glass. However, as companies continue to prioritise user experience, simplicity, and cost management, Teams has emerged as one of the most popular foundational tools for the unified CX/UC experience.
Microsoft Teams already offers companies a phenomenal way to unify distributed workers with collaboration, productivity, and AI-driven tools. With over 300 million users worldwide, the solution has become a core part of the digital work hub for countless companies. For these organisations, leveraging the flexibility of Teams to bring contact centre and UC technology together makes sense.
Microsoft Teams already offers access to a variety of contact centre features, such as auto attendant and call queuing capabilities within Microsoft Teams Voice, and integrations with Microsoft 365 Dynamics. However, the agile and open platform also empowers companies to build their own ideal contact centre within Teams, through certified partner solutions.
These solutions offer access to comprehensive business telephony solutions, recording tools, analytics, and other advanced features, within the Teams landscape. They provide an easy way to transform Microsoft Teams into a full UCaaS and CCaaS service.
The Benefits of Unifying Microsoft Teams and the Contact Centre
So, why are companies rapidly adopting Microsoft Teams contact centre solutions? On a broad level, combining UCaaS and CCaaS technologies can deliver a host of benefits. With a unified ecosystem for internal and external communication, companies can:
- Improve team collaboration: Merging UC and CX tools helps companies to improve interactions between front-line agents, internal teams, and subject matter experts. With an all-in-one environment, teams can work collaborative on customer issues for faster results.
- Enhance productivity: Fewer applications and tools to manage means fewer roadblocks to employee productivity. With a unified UC and CX solution, companies can empower staff to work more efficiently, with streamlined workflows, and reduced data silos. Some solutions even offer access to automation, to minimise repetitive tasks.
- Increase customer satisfaction: Unifying CX and the UC environment makes it easier for employees to deliver better customer experiences. Not only can agents work faster and more collaboratively to solve problems, but they can also access a unified view of customer journey insights and data in one space, to create more personalized interactions.
- Unlock useful insights: With extensive analytical and reporting tools, companies can track useful data about agent performance, customer satisfaction, team productivity and more all in the same place. With more visibility into both the workforce and the customer experience, brands can make more intelligent decisions for growth.
- Reduce costs: Aligning different as-a-service solutions in a single ecosystem can even help businesses to save money on their CX strategy. Companies can rapidly scale features up and down according to their needs, minimise training costs, and unlock new opportunities to save money with more effective forecasting and scheduling tools.
Unifying Microsoft Teams with the contact centre delivers all of these benefits, as well as some bonus advantages. For instance, it ensures companies can make the most out of the full Microsoft portfolio of productivity tools, AI solutions, and innovations for every business process.
Additionally, it provides access to an easy-to-use environment for full omnichannel service, opening the door to new modes of serving customers in the digital age.
What to Look for in a Microsoft Teams CC Solution
As the convergence of UC solutions like Microsoft Teams and contact centre technologies grows increasingly commonplace, numerous tools have emerged to help bridge the gap for brands. However, not all solutions are alike. Choosing the right Microsoft Teams contact centre solution means not just finding a service that provides a native and streamlined integration, but also offers access to the latest intuitive features for boosting total experience (TX).
The most powerful solutions today should include:
- Innovative AI: Artificial Intelligence can improve both employee productivity, through automation, and customer experience, via conversational insights. The right Microsoft Teams contact centre will feature intelligent tools for routing, conversational analytics, self-service bot creation, and virtual agents all in the same place.
- Seamless connectivity: As mentioned above, a Microsoft Teams contact centre should provide truly seamless connectivity, for a native in-app experience. Companies should look for vendors which offer access to direct routing and Operator Connect solutions.
- Automation: No-code automation tools and workflows can empower agents and internal employees to work more effectively together, and share customer data. The right tools will make it simple to queue calls, collect crucial data from conversations and more.
- Analytics: In-depth analytics and reporting tools help businesses to make more intelligent decisions for growth. The best contact centre solutions for Microsoft Teams will offer both historical reporting options and real-time dashboards for data tracking.
- Security: While Microsoft Teams has its own security features, a contact centre solution for Teams should enhance these capabilities even further. Look for a solution that’s compliant with the latest regulations, and secured to the highest standards.
The Convergence of UC and CC
The demand for contact centre and UC convergence in the modern business world is likely to continue growing in the years ahead. As companies look for ways to streamline their technology stack, improve productivity, and enhance customer experience, bringing UC and contact centre tools together will be crucial. However, it’s important for business leaders to ensure they’re choosing the right partners to work with, to help them connect the dots.
