Enterprise communications has never been more important for the employee and customer experience, and to ensure that business runs smoothly every day - and every night.
None more so than in contact centres, which must process a high number of calls at almost any time of the day.
Teams has become a staple of internal and external communications throughout almost every enterprise in the last couple of years, and it's for good reason.
Businesses have been quick to realise the gains that Teams provides for the Contact Centre. But what are those gains? Enghouse Interactive summarises these in its Contact Centre Playbook for Microsoft Teams ebook, available for download.
Here are four ways to integrate the contact centre with Microsoft Teams and improve the customer experience offered by your business:
1. Omni-channel routing
Contact centres have often been isolated from an organisation's wider business. That is now changing rapidly due to the pandemic, which has spurred widespread adoption of collaboration and communication tools to bring all parts of the business together.
It makes sense to extend this to contact centres. By combining Teams with a natively integrated contact centre solution, organisations can:
- Enable employees to be more engaged no matter where they are
- Instantly escalate customer service issues to VIP contacts
- Offer real time agent availability - by knowing which colleagues are available, and when
- Deliver all channels for escalation and cross-channel context for previous engagement
- Reduce third party tools needed to support daily operations and digital transformation
- Provide IT staff with full control of contact centre tools
- Onboard staff faster, due to Teams' easy-to-use and smart interface, that means employees can adopt the technology quickly.
2. Operator console
A natively integrated operator attendant console enhances functionality within Microsoft Teams and any console solution. Agents and callers benefit from:
- Real time agent availability so staff know where their colleagues are
- A chat function that helps staff talk with others before transferring an important call
- Easy and efficient distribution of calls and messages to teams
- Reduction in the amount of time spent handling calls and double-handling
- An integrated Teams console solution that provides automatic call queuing, re-routing to backups, visual call monitoring, reporting, and more
- A tool that is easily administered and rolled out to staff as needed
3. Quality assurance and compliance: interaction recording
Every contact centre wishing to monitor and improve the customer experience needs to be able to capture conversations so that supervisors can review and provide feedback to agents. Recording interactions may also be needed for compliance purposes.
- Enabling PTSN and internal Teams-to-Teams call recording via native call recording ensures all calls can be recorded
- Contact centres working with calls, emails, web chat, social media and SMS will also want to consider a single provider of omni-channel recording that offers Teams integration for voice.
4. Call billing
When rolling out Teams, one quick way of keeping track of adoption is to use a call billing solution that measures both performance and activity prior to, during, and after migration.
Dashboards and reports are useful tools to understand call records and quality of service data, both from Teams and other platforms.
- Cost management can independently cost all calls, then analyse and apportion these costs across different groups, such as users and departments. Organisations can also uncover what is not used and can action cost reduction appropriately.
- Call analysis solutions can help organisations migrate systems - for example, from on-premise PBX to Teams.
- Measuring remote employee performance and activity helps employees to remain productive and achieve KPIs without being overworked.
- A natively integrated call billing solution can also provide complete call journey analysis, including how many call legs a customer has been through, how often calls were unanswered or transferred in queue, and other insights. These can assist with understanding the customer experience.
Download the Contact Centre Playbook for Microsoft Teams here.
Enghouse Interactive offers native integration with Teams
Enghouse Interactive offers a suite of contact centre solutions that seamlessly integrate with Microsoft Teams for collaboration benefits. These solutions include Enghouse Communications Centre, which is one of the first solutions to be certified under the Microsoft Connected Contact Centre for Microsoft Teams Certification Program.
This solution is a fully-featured omni-channel contact centre solution that includes customer self-service and IVR, queuing and routing, and delivery of calls to Microsoft Teams clients on agent desktops.
The portfolio includes an operator attendant console for Microsoft Teams that enables frontline staff to route calls through to the best available person to handle an issue. The offering also provides a suite of management tools for the contact centre, including recording, quality management, and comprehensive reporting and analytics.
It uses Teams Direct Routing to enable organisations to choose their own telephony options for voice connectivity whilst leveraging call delivery, supervisor monitoring and control of calls handled by agents using Teams across any number of physical locations.
You can find out more at Enghouse's upcoming webinar series, Contact Centre for Microsoft Teams Tech Clinics.
Session 1. How does an Enghouse contact centre with Microsoft Teams work?
DATE: Wednesday 24th March at 12pm AEDT, 2pm NZDT, 9am SGT
PRESENTERS: Phil Robson and Carina Tu
Session 2. Things to consider when migrating your contact centre to Microsoft Teams
DATE: Thursday 15th April at 12pm AEST, 2pm NZST, 10am SGT
PRESENTERS: Richard Winterburn and Andrea Chiplin
Session 3. The Future of an Omnichannel Contact Centre with Microsoft Teams
DATE: Tuesday 11th May at 12pm AEST, 2pm NZST, 10am SGT
PRESENTERS: Tony Athanasiou and Anna Stokes
