Microsoft Teams connects the contact centre, extends its reach into other departments, and drives collaboration across the business.
As such, it not only enables better contact centre communication – which is critical in the "new normal" – but allows the function to create alliances for the good of CX. Understanding this, many cloud contact centre providers now augment their solutions with Microsoft Teams.
In this edition of the CX Today roundtable, spokespeople from three of these industry-leading technology vendors join us:
- Anna Stokes – Product Director at Enghouse Interactive
- Hans Kramer - Global Head of Marketing at Anywhere365
- Koby Amedume – International Marketing Director at NICE CXone
Sharing their insights into how contact centres can best exploit the power of Microsoft Teams, our expert panellists answer a series of frequently asked questions (FAQs).
Why build or deploy a contact centre around the MS Teams product?
Stokes: When implementing a Teams enabled Enghouse Contact Center, companies take advantage of leading CCaaS and UCaaS systems built to interact seamlessly.
As a result, contact centres can harness the powerful collaboration tools within Microsoft Teams. Workplace chat, video meetings, and shared file storage facilitate a seamless remote working experience.
Kramer: It saves time and money. With an entire workforce working from Teams’ single pane of glass, some customers report saving up to 50 seconds per conversation. That is huge!
Teams also introduces a new paradigm for business communications. It enables companies to spread contact centre capabilities and deliver them to every Teams user across the entire company
Enabling everyone to become the “contact centre” at particular points of the customer journey is helpful to drive more value from its customer insights.
Amedume: Company-wide collaboration, even if virtual, is the pillar of a functioning working environment and helps to deliver better customer and agent experiences.
By helping employees access experts anywhere from everywhere, Microsoft Teams enables a vital knowledge source to support agents during calls. In doing so, it simplifies and streamlines the agent experience.
Supporting chat, video, call meetings, and document sharing on a single platform, the solution also unifies communication and drives collaboration, especially in hybrid-working environments.
How does the platform complement CX?
Stokes: When the entire business uses Teams, the contact centre enjoys unprecedented communication opportunities.
As such, many facets of the agent experience improves, complementing CX. For example, agents can:
- Ping a message over to a supervisor, or a Team of supervisors, for immediate assistance with a tricky customer query
- Immediately consult with subject matter experts (SMEs) via chat, enabling quicker resolutions and lower use of the hold function
- See which colleagues are available, through presence visibility, to gain support from the best available person
Also, conferencing with other users, sharing resources, and updating materials in real-time streamlines agent experiences and increases morale.
Why is this good for CX? Because happy employees = happy customers. A cliché, but it is a cliché for a reason.
Kramer: Our Microsoft Teams solution enables enterprises to speed up customer queries through collaboration, saving time for the company and its customers.
Also, using Teams as the backbone for customer conversations makes it easy to funnel requests from an IVR or voicebot to the right team, agent, or self-service solution.