Ensuring good Customer Experience (CX) has always been of the utmost importance for companies as it is the bedrock of any successful business. Ensuring good CX at the onset of the pandemic and during it has been one of the main challenges for the industry as the majority of employees and contact centre agents were forced to work remotely.
Microsoft Teams has served as a backbone of internal communications for businesses throughout the pandemic, and innovation from the tech titan and third party providers has led to creative CX solutions to be delivered on the platform.
We spoke with Luware CEO Philipp Beck and Content Guru’s Solutions Director, Jay Choudry to get their insights on the most pressing challenges when adding CX tools to Teams, the opportunities for businesses in enabling Teams for CX, as well as how they see Microsoft develop CX capabilities over the next year and a half.
What are the major challenges in adding CX tools into Microsoft Teams?
There are many advantages to using Microsoft Teams for CX, even if it does not yet tick all of the “classic” required feature lists in RFPs, according to Luware’s Beck.
“Customers should think ahead and out of the box of traditional CX. If you invest in the right platform today, you will be ready for the next era of digitalization and you can evolve CX,” he advised.
“As a result of Microsoft tremendously pushing the adoption in Teams calling, we are receiving many requests for our solution. The challenge is to serve them all with the quality we hold ourselves accountable to and to scale together with Microsoft.”
Content Guru’s Choudry added that though Teams is an excellent tool for internal communications, it lacks the CX capabilities that contact centres need.
“Our approach is to address the challenges that Teams can’t solve by itself for contact centres by using our expertise to develop targeted integrations with our own solutions,” he said.
“It is important to ensure these integrations are seamless, so that users can enjoy the same easy-to-use interface provided by Teams, but also enjoy added functionality such as recording, reporting and inbound and outbound external calling”
What is the major opportunity for businesses to have a fully fledged CX enabled Teams system?
Teams can be used as a “steering hub” to navigate CX in the cloud. You can seamlessly connect and integrate relevant business tools within the Microsoft platform said Luware’s Beck.
“Power Automate also enables the integration of third-party applications such as a CRM or ticketing system,” he noted.
“This allows businesses to create a central experience hub for holistic interaction management. This massively improves customer, as well as employee experience, as the experience becomes smoother and all relevant information can be found in one central place”
He added that using Teams for CX has the added benefit of cost efficiency, as many businesses have already invested in the Teams ecosystem and only need to pay a small additional fee for the services that they require.
Content Guru’s Choudry called Microsoft Teams the “holy grail” of homeworking, due to the array of communication tools it offers users.
“A fully-fledged, CX-enabled Teams system allows calls and information to flow freely between a contact centre’s external communications solution and Teams. This dialogue empowers the workforce to collaborate with one another, wherever they are working from,” he stated.
“Organisations should choose a vendor that offers a set of seamless Teams integration options to allow them to maximise the value that Teams is delivering. It is no longer just an option to integrate Teams with your CX tools, as it has solidified itself as one of the key ways colleagues prefer to communicate.”
How will the Microsoft story around CX develop over the next 12-18 months?
Microsoft is dedicated to building the right set of APIs for third party vendors, allowing them to build CX solutions directly inside the Teams platform, said Luware’s Beck. He predicted that the industry will see new API calls on the Graph to make some of the classic features work in the future, and that the huge investments in Azure Communication Services (ACS) “will change the game again”.
Luware is also invested in removing silos and to integrate CX into one single UC solution.
“Removing CX silos is so important for us. There is such a huge benefit to having one single UC solution and to combine it with CX,” he said.
“In Microsoft Teams a simple task such as routing overflows over locations is easily possible. This is also possible with the larger CX vendors, but the associated costs are huge. Microsoft Teams in the CX space will commoditise this and make it affordable for every company”
Choudry added that additional integrations, such as Microsoft Dynamics, are already assisting organisations in delivering improved customer journeys. This type of integration enables the ability to provide customers with a more personalised journey.
He is also excited to see what Microsoft Viva, the recently launched employee experience platform, brings to the table and how it can enhance CX.
“Microsoft says it is designed to provide digital tools to support remote workers, with four modules focused on employee engagement, well-being, learning, and knowledge,” said Choudry.
“For CCaaS partners, it will be really interesting to understand how this might work well together with an organisation’s existing contact centre technology to enhance employee satisfaction, which in turn ramps up CX”
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