Blog: 5 signs it’s time to migrate your Teams environment to a Contact Center

Staying connected with Teams

Microsoft Teams is the go-to solution for growing businesses that want to manage the challenges of vibrant collaboration and communication with key clients using Teams Calling.

However, despite its many capabilities, Teams doesn’t quite cover all the requirements of customer contact, especially as your customers increase.

Customer contact is an often-neglected side of a business growth plan. Yet this ever-present issue can quickly become a significant constraint on growth, especially as you start to gain momentum.

Growing needs

As your business grows, so does your need for first-class customer service.

Your existing customers will require periodic assistance and new customers require careful nurturing and advice. As time goes on, your customer service burden will only continue to snowball.

Are you equipped to handle this with your current Microsoft Teams Calling setup?

If the situations below are familiar to you, it may be time to migrate your Teams environment to a Contact Center.

1. “Wait, who’s answering the calls?”

As you start getting more queries from customers, it quickly becomes apparent that someone needs to be responsible for picking up calls quickly and forwarding them to the right person.

Your whole team is busy, so the solution may be a dedicated role or a one that’s shared in rotation. In either case, someone must be the designated phone attendant.

If you work in an agile and flexible way, it may not be clear within Teams who’s available, who’s in the office, or who’s working from home.

However, by using the Attendant Console for Teams, your phone attendant gets the visibility they need, plus some handy tools too.

If the right colleague is available, then you can directly connect the customer with the right agent. With the Attendant Console for Teams, you can immediately see who’s available, see who’s on a call, get an overview of agendas, and handle variable capacity with handy features like call-back requests.

This way, your customer gets their call answered fast, and gets connected to the best person to solve their query.

2. “We don’t know who’s calling!”

As you move from a smaller client base towards a growing volume of customers, you’ll still want to offer the same level of ‘personal’ service they’re accustomed to.

Otherwise, they might leave.

Customers can easily feel ‘anonymous’ and undervalued if they must justify each call by first answering a set of questions: “Who are you? What are you calling about? Which item/order is it about?”

It gives the impression that you don’t know who they are, even if they’re your #1 client.

The solution is to connect your Teams environment with your CRM, by using ROGER365.io as a bridge. This way you can see all the details of incoming calls directly in the Teams client, before picking up.

Customers will get the highest level of personal service because you can greet them by name, and have immediate knowledge of their details, timeline, recent orders, and open tickets. Afterwards, you can update the CRM with information from each interaction.

This turns each customer query into a data resource that can improve your understanding of each customer.

3.“Social channels are a bit difficult to handle”

Social channels can be a powerful way to connect with customers in a low-threshold, convenient way. Customers increasingly demand the convenience of social messaging like WhatsApp for getting the answers they need without waiting for their call to be picked up.

When done right, social messaging can be equally convenient and impactful for your business too. But it must be handled properly – in a compliant way that’s connected to your business processes.

Far too often, organizations are straining to meet demands with only the native capabilities of the WhatsApp for Business desktop app. In some cases, they’re using a dedicated ‘WhatsApp Phone’ to serve customers.

It’s an inefficient way of doing things, and it misses out on a lot of possibilities.

This becomes especially problematic as your query volumes grow, as each conversation becomes detached from your integrated processes, customer knowledge, and resources.

Instead, you can gain powerful synergies by bringing social channels like WhatsApp directly into your Teams client. By using ROGER365.io to integrate WhatsApp with Teams, you benefit from a secure and compliant environment, plus integration with your CRMs and other resources.

This means that each WhatsApp chat becomes connected to your wider knowledge of the customer context. You can also start to leverage WhatsApp as an efficient tool for customer outreach, with personalized offers and flows that can fully automate interactions.

4. “There’s never enough time in the day”

The reality of a growing business is that each team member is always stretching to achieve the most from their available time. And it’s never enough time to perform all their tasks and answer queries from customers.

But what if you could automate your most common workflows, and trigger them directly from Teams?

Automated workflows can save huge amounts of time, and streamline your operations with frictionless query resolution. This is fully achievable with a ROGER365.io Teams Contact Center. The platform enables your organization to integrate multiple applications into your Teams environment, thereby extending your capabilities and the possibilities for complex automations.

Automations are easily built with the ROGER365.io Flow Editor, too.

It has an intuitive graphical ‘drag and drop’ interface, so you can create time-saving automated workflows or IVR menus in minutes.

5. “We have no overview or visibility of customer contact”

How well are you serving customers right now? How long are customers waiting before their call is answered, and how long does each resolution take?

Unless you have real time visibility and reporting, it’s hard to tell and even harder to improve.

While in the past you could glance around the office to see which colleagues were speaking with customers (and how well they’re doing it), this is getting much harder. Your team is growing, and hybrid working makes it harder to know if a team member needs extra support.

This will only get tougher as call volumes increase.

To maintain your edge (and keep customers happy), you must be able to measure and optimize your performance with reporting and insights. This can help reduce waiting times and identify common bottlenecks in your processes.

It’s always better to have a clear overview, but some industries need to meet stringent requirements for auditing and compliance too. For example, if you’re handling payments over the phone or operate in certain sectors, then you must provide compliant call recording and traceability.

To make sure you’re meeting all your key objectives, it’s essential you can gain insights over customer contact in Teams, use in-depth reporting and analytics, and have a real-time overview of the situation right now.  

A ROGER365.io Teams Contact Center offers both in-depth reporting, and a dedicated Supervisor App for real-time oversight. This way, you can see what’s going on at any time, and help agents on tough calls by whispering, joining, or taking over the call. You can also see who’s active, and log in (or log off) specific agents, as needed, at any time. 

How to serve all these needs directly within Microsoft Teams

If these challenges sound familiar to you, then it may be time to consider a Teams Contact Center.

While many Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions can be somewhat rigid and inflexible, a Teams Contact Center based on the extend model can grow with your business.

ROGER365.io can uplift Teams’ native capabilities and turn it into a scalable contact center that increases your agility and improves efficiency. With its growth-friendly pricing structure, you can immediately improve your customer experiences and unblock a major constraint on future growth.

In addition to the benefits listed above, ROGER365.io can enhance your customer service with AI-powered chatbots, omnichannel communications, and more.

Want to see for yourself what it can do? Book a demo, or sign up for your free 14-day trial now.

FAQs

What are the 4 elements of a Contact Center?

There are 4 essential elements of a contact center, these are: Agents, Supervisors, Automations, and Reporting. In addition to this, there are 4 technology pillars, and 5 functional pillars of a contact center. All elements must work together to achieve the best customer experiences and optimal business outcomes.

Does Microsoft Teams have a contact center?

Microsoft Teams does not have the native capabilities of a full contact center, but it can be extended to provide them using ROGER365.io or another Microsoft certified extend-model CCaaS solution.

Can you use Microsoft Teams with WhatsApp?

The best way to integrate WhatsApp into Microsoft Teams is to use the ROGER365.io Teams Contact Center. This contact center solution is incredibly versatile, with the ability to support omnichannel contact including WhatsApp, as a fully integrated communications channel.

What is the Attendant Console for Teams?

The Attendant Console for Teams is a powerful dedicated interface for phone attendants, providing a wealth of advanced features and tools for telephone operators and phone attendants. These enable them to rapidly answer calls and connect them with the right person.