Are you looking to replace your old phone system with Microsoft Teams? Good choice! But, before you take the plunge into cloud telephony, it’s worth taking a moment to consider how this move will affect your employees.
To enable a seamless transition, review your calling touchpoints and check if the built-in functions in Teams will meet your employees’ needs. If not, you can add additional call management and contact center functionality through third-party extensions.
Touchpoints will differ between companies, but below are some common use cases that are affected by an organization’s telephony system.
Receptionists need an attendant console to handle calls effectively.
Receptionists are the gatekeepers of business. They answer and filter incoming calls and transfer them to the responsible employees. To do their job well and make an excellent first impression, receptionists require an attendant console to handle calls effectively.
Built-in transfer options in Teams are limited and not optimal for busy receptionists and front desks. Third-party solutions let you integrate an attendant console directly into Teams. That way, receptionists only need to navigate one platform and don’t have to switch between different solutions. An attendant console provides receptionists with the right tools and features to handle calls effectively:
Call pickup groups, sometimes also called hunt groups, refer to a group of people answering an impersonal phone number such as a Sales or HR hotline. When you migrate to Teams, you must consider how you will migrate and manage these various department hotlines.
To ensure that no calls get lost, you have to set up and manage call groups in Teams. Microsoft Teams offers some basic routing and IVR functionality. However, the setup and management require an IT administrator. Personal configurations are limited, call reporting is basic, and there is no graphic call flow designer.
Third-party routing solutions can extend Teams with advanced functionality and user convenience. They typically offer:
Employees already use Teams for collaboration and direct communication. The migration to cloud telephony is an opportunity to also bring service departments to Teams.
You probably have a department that provides internal services, such as an IT or HR helpdesk. These operate similarly to call groups but also need a case management or ticketing tool. To resolve problems quickly or keep track of open tickets, it’s important that calls get distributed to the correct employees and that these employees can access and track the case history.
Since the employees are already using Teams for collaboration and direct communication, migrating to cloud telephony is an excellent opportunity to bring these service departments to Teams. Since every user on Teams is already identified, there is no need for additional authentication. And Teams’ omnichannel capabilities with voice, video, file sharing, and screen share are compelling for internal service desks, especially for IT support.
Third-party solutions will add extensive call routing capabilities, user management, and powerful automation features to boost your service desk’s efficiency:
Your organization probably still has physical locations – retail stores, headquarters, warehouses, or branch offices. Customers, suppliers, and partners want to get in touch with these locations for various reasons, such as checking if a product is in store or accessing the delivery ramp.
Having branch numbers is vital to provide location-specific information. With Teams, you can easily manage these branch numbers from anywhere.
Extending Teams with advanced routing and queueing capabilities, and maybe even with an attendant console solution, allows employees to answer the branch numbers to:
You may also have subsidiaries or divisions that operate as independent legal entities, for example, different brands or independent brokers. Rolling out Teams telephony across all subsidiaries, divisions, and brokers help you to simplify IT and streamline communication.
You should be aware, however, that Teams is incapable of recreating organizational units and permissions for call management. This only becomes possible with extensions from third-party providers.
Centralizing the administration of the service numbers of all entities with third-party solutions allows you to simplify IT and empower users with these capabilities:
Multi-site telephony with Teams
With contact center extensions for Teams you can create more collaborative customer service.
The ultimate customer touchpoint is usually the contact center. You probably have a hotline where dedicated agents provide support and answer customer inquiries about products, claims, and returns.
To manage these agents, you need sophisticated routing options and extensive reporting. When you roll our Teams as your company-wide telephony system, you need to consider how you will manage the contact center.
To fully leverage these benefits of Teams, you can bring agents on the same communication platform as other employees. That way, you can simplify your IT and create more collaborative customer service.
Contact center extensions add the needed extras to Teams to turn it into a fully functional contact center solution:
If you are migrating to Teams cloudy telephony, it makes sense to migrate every touchpoint. That way, Teams becomes your singular experience hub. For a seamless migration, assess all your calling touchpoints first. Identify all the gaps where the Teams built-in functionality is not sufficient and look for third-party solutions that can address these. This will prevent departments from looking for their own solutions and prevent a shadow IT. Teams is a powerful platform, and with third-party solutions, nothing should prevent you from maintaining a smooth operation. Check out our call management and contact center add-ons for Teams
Want to learn more about how to manage all your touchpoints in Teams?