As companies continue to compete almost entirely on the basis of excellent customer experience, demand for innovative, intuitive, and scalable contact center solutions is growing. As a leader in the technology landscape, Microsoft has dived head-first into the development of a modern contact center platform that empowers and augments today’s teams.
The Microsoft Digital Contact Center platform, combines the power of various powerful tools from Microsoft’s portfolio, into an all-in-one solution for enhancing customer experience.
Open, extensible, and collaborative, the platform is well-positioned to give today’s companies a critical edge in the CX landscape. However, before you consider adopting the platform, it’s important to understand its benefits, and the potential challenges you’ll need to overcome.
The Components of Microsoft’s Contact Center Platform
Microsoft’s Digital Contact Center platform aligns various critical tools already used by countless businesses for data and customer relationship management, productivity, and collaboration. The core elements of the ecosystem include:
- Microsoft Teams: One of the world’s leading communication and collaboration platforms, combining messaging, conferencing, and more. This platform can be extended with the support of third-party partners like Bright Pattern, so employees can collaborate and handle customer interactions in one environment, for a seamless omnichannel experience.
- Office 365: Microsoft’s comprehensive collection of productivity tools, used for everything from content creation to data analysis. Office 365 gives employees they need to share data with other agents and customers, and build comprehensive knowledgebase articles.
- Microsoft Dynamics 365: Microsoft Dynamics 365 is one of the top customer relationship management (CRM) software solutions. It provides a central hub for analyzing, storing, and managing customer data, allowing agents to see a comprehensive history of customer interactions, to create more personalized experience.
- Nuance AI: Microsoft’s acquisition of Nuance brings industry-leading AI and speech recognition capabilities into the contact center platform. It enables access to intelligent self-service chatbots, and agent support solutions with real-time transcription, and next-best-action recommendations for agents.
The Benefits of a Microsoft-Centric Contact Center
Already popular around the world for its intuitive and flexible technologies, Microsoft is quickly emerging as a valuable partner in the contact center landscape. With the right partner, and Microsoft’s Digital Contact Center platform, companies can create a comprehensive ecosystem for customer service and engagement, leveraging benefits like:
- Omnichannel engagement: 76% of today’s customers expect streamlined and consistent interactions across all departments, but countless companies still struggle to deliver a true omnichannel experience. With a contact center solution built into Microsoft Teams, companies can interact easily with customers across voice, video and chat, while retaining context from each stage of the conversation.
- Improved agent efficiency: With a connected contact center, CRM solution, and access to productivity tools, agents have all of the resources they need to optimize their productivity. They can leverage all of the customer information they need, and AI tools within Teams, streamlining workflows and reducing resolution times.
- Self-service options: AI-powered chatbots can help companies to handle routine inquiries within the Microsoft Nuance environment. This ensures agents have more time to focus on complex issues that require empathy and creativity. What’s more, it means companies can offer 24/7 service to their customers.
- Data-driven insights: Dynamics 365 gives companies a wealth of useful insights they can use to identify trends, opportunities, and risks. The information companies gather from their ecosystem can help them improve processes, increase customer loyalty, and reduce costs.
- Scalability and security: The secure cloud-based platform offered by Microsoft ensures companies can rapidly adapt to meet changing market dynamics, without compromising on compliance and privacy.
Considerations for a Microsoft-Centric Contact Center
Microsoft’s Digital contact center solution represents a powerful solution for companies looking to innovate, grow, and enhance their customer experience strategy. However, there are some potential challenges to overcome too. For instance, Microsoft’s solution is a comprehensive and powerful platform that integrates a range of tools into one environment.
However, ensuring true alignment between these components, and the tools and resources you already use in your organization can be complicated. An experienced systems integrator, like Bright Pattern, can offer companies the expertise and guidance they need to combine their existing resources, contact center, and telephony solutions with the breadth of tools offered by Microsoft.
The right partner can also help companies to minimize the cost of upgrading to a cloud-based contact center solution, helping them to use their resources more effectively. Michael McCloskey, CEO of Bright Pattern added, “Bright Pattern is fully integrated into the Microsoft ecosystem, including AI offerings and certifications of Microsoft Dynamics and Teams. Additionally, we have built Microsoft specific functionality such as task item routing to further enhance Microsoft offerings that provide customers with unparalleled benefits.”
Another potential challenge comes from the need for ongoing maintenance and optimization in your Microsoft-centric contact center. Maintaining a complex and integrated system of tools does require ongoing technical resources. Once again, working with the right partner on a comprehensive implementation can help to address this issue.
Microsoft’s open and flexible platform allows companies to work with the partner of their choice, integrating contact center infrastructures and existing tools, and leveraging expert support through every stage of the deployment and maintenance cycle.
Vendors like Bright Pattern can work with companies through every stage of the migration, deployment, and development process. They can even offer access to advanced tools for AI-driven sentiment analysis, and reporting in the contact center landscape.
Unlocking the Opportunities of a Microsoft-Centric Contact Center
Overall, a Microsoft-centric contact center could be a powerful option for many businesses, particularly those who already have an investment in Microsoft’s thriving ecosystem. This comprehensive solution offers companies a unified and data-driven approach to enhancing customer service, and improving agent productivity.
Used correctly, the technology can elevate customer satisfaction and operational efficiency, and even reduce long-term costs. However, companies still need to invest in the right partnerships to ensure they’re implementing, managing, and maintaining their technology correctly.
The right Microsoft partner can help organizations to make the most of their digital contact center investment, aligning technologies, and providing access to incredible support and value-added services. Contact Bright Pattern to learn more about how they can help you implement the ideal Microsoft-centric contact center for your company’s growth.
