Comms Business – Adding Value to Microsoft Teams

The July issue of Comms Business looked at adding value to Microsoft. Many UK channel partners have been riding the Microsoft Teams growth curve since it exploded during the pandemic.

Since then, the growth has continued, with Microsoft now reporting 320 million Microsoft Teams users worldwide. Teams is central to the digital workplace for chatting, collaborating, and sharing. It’s cloud-based, so it’s available everywhere, and it’s fully integrated with the Microsoft 365 productivity stack, including Office, Sharepoint, and increasingly, Microsoft’s AI tool, Copilot.

Channel partners who haven’t yet adopted Teams need to get on the growth curve. The opportunity is bigger than you might think – Teams is not just a collaboration solution, it can play a much bigger role at the heart of an organization’s efforts to improve employee and customer experiences.

In addition to its collaboration features, Microsoft Teams can function as an enterprise phone system, a contact center, a compliance and interaction logging solution, and an AI-powered meeting analytics platform.

This all sounds like a great opportunity for channels to deepen and broaden customer relationships by adding more value. So let’s take a look at the value-added opportunities:

1) Give teams a voice

Teams Phone is the only calling solution that is native to Microsoft Teams. For over 20 million users worldwide, Teams has replaced the need for a separate business phone system or PBX by making telephony a fully integrated part of the Teams user experience.

There are several ways for channel partners to make Teams Phone available to their customers – Direct Routing and Operator Connect (for service providers) allow customers to continue using their existing lines and minutes provider services.

Microsoft also offers its own calling plans. Teams Phone helps organizations save money, simplify support, and speed user onboarding compared to running separate telephony and collaboration platforms. Integrating voice with Teams also opens up a range of possibilities with AI-powered apps that use voice as the primary interface for interacting with customers or employees.

2) Make Teams a CX Powerhouse

As the IT industry transitions to cloud services, we are seeing a dramatic increase in the convergence of unified communications and contact center as a service (UCaaS and CCaaS).

Teams, at the heart of enterprise collaboration, is driving this trend. It has some basic contact center capabilities built in, such as call queues, but for more demanding contact center needs or relatively simple customer interaction needs, such as helpdesk, sales, or customer service, Teams can be seamlessly integrated with third-party contact centers built on Azure.

This integration facilitates better collaboration between contact center agents and back-office staff, who play a key role in improving the customer experience. For the channel community, the ability to offer Teams contact center capabilities “as a service” creates an opportunity for higher margins, recurring revenue, and more loyal customers.

3) Make Teams Meetings a Business Intelligence Tool

In the hybrid workplace, the growth of Teams meetings has been phenomenal. Everything discussed in these meetings is a critical business intelligence asset. AI-powered applications that can automatically record, transcribe, take minutes, and analyze the content of Teams meetings provide tremendous value to individual participants and business leaders.

The opportunity across channels is to enable organizations to make meeting content a core business intelligence resource that helps improve staff productivity and executive decision-making. It’s a compelling story to tell your customers.

4) Don’t neglect compliance and interaction logging

In industries like finance, law, government, and healthcare, logging all interactions is a regulatory or industry requirement. When migrating to Microsoft Teams, it’s critical to maintain compliance and ensure that logging and analytics can cover all modes of interaction in Teams, whether it’s phone calls, video calls, or chats.

Another AI-powered application that creates added value for the enterprise using Teams and represents an additional growth opportunity for channel partners.

Channel Possibility

Channels looking to leverage the multi-stream development capabilities of Teams need to partner with a vendor that can provide the assurance of Microsoft certification and has years of experience helping enterprises leverage Teams.

AudioCodes Live Platform is a unique software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that makes it easy for partners to add Teams Phone, deploying an award-winning, AI-First Teams certified contact center with interaction recording and AI-powered analytics to improve meeting outcomes.

One platform offering multiple SaaS services that simplify and accelerate customer acquisition and generate additional recurring revenue and margins.