Microsoft Viva has hit a landmark of 20 million monthly active users, despite only launching in February 2021.
Such encouraging results come as Microsoft promises to expand the solution – now used by the likes of Finastra, SES, and Unilever – to meet role-specific needs.
Viva Sales is already giving a taster of this. Sharing an example in a recent earnings call, Satya Nadella, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Microsoft, said:
Viva Sales is helping salespeople at companies like Adobe, Crayon, and PwC reclaim their time by bringing customer interactions across Teams and Outlook directly into their CRM system.
By bringing such use cases deeper into the contact center, Viva has the potential – in the future – to delve into separate applications and surface helpful insights to agents, perhaps in real-time.
As more contact centers integrate with Teams, such a prospect draws closer, which will likely push those 20 million monthly active users up even higher.
Yet, the possibilities expand far beyond the contact center and may impact CX in other ways. For example, by delivering customer insights across the business, the customer perspective may start to seep its way into more business decisions.
Of course, these are all possibilities that extend far into the future.
Yet, with Microsoft’s significant enterprise reach, many more opportunities to drive employee and customer experience forward through Viva will likely come to the fore.
Microsoft’s Employee Experience Platform
Integrated into Microsoft Outlook and Teams, Viva brings together communications, insights, knowledge, and learning within the flow of everyday work – leveraging information from various enterprise systems.
Such systems include Salesforce, SAP Success Factors, ServiceNow, Slack, Zoom, and many more.
Given this range of partners, businesses can use Viva to spotlight relevant learning resources, business intelligence insights, and performance statistics.
For instance, perhaps a team harnesses ServiceNow. Through Viva, employees could automatically pull knowledge articles, request access to particular applications, or book an office workspace.
Such examples highlight how businesses can bolster their WFO efforts, across many departments, from service to IT to HR and so on.
From a CX perspective, the obvious benefit follows the adage: happy employees = happy customers.
Yet, in addition to the future contact center use cases, it may support developers leading CX transformation initiatives in accessing the best information when they need it most.
A Challenging, But Promising Quarter for Microsoft
Microsoft endured a challenging quarter. While its sales rose 11 percent – to a total of $50.1bn – this was its slowest revenue rise in five years.
This drop was likely driven by businesses cutting back on spending during economic uncertainty and the dollar’s strength, making sales outside of the U.S more expensive.
As a result, it has suffered like many other enterprise CX vendors – such as its CRM rivals Salesforce and HubSpot – which are battening down the hatches.
However, through the murkiness comes many promising signs, like the rise of Viva.
Moreover, it seems many businesses are becoming hooked on Microsoft Teams, with commercial users engaging with the platform 1,500 times per month on average.
With Microsoft pulling its CCaaS solution closer to the UCaaS platform – alongside its Dynamics and Power portfolios – the growth potential is exciting. As Nadella said:
Teams is becoming a ubiquitous platform for business process.
Another promising sign – from a CX perspective – includes the continued rise of Power BI – the market-leading solution, according to the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant.
Indeed, Nadella stated that it is “growing faster than [the] competition”, in a field that includes the likes of Salesforce and Google (Looker).
As such, there are many reasons for hopefulness at Microsoft despite the recent drear of layoffs, slow revenue rises, and increasing costs.
