Looking forward to 2024, one of the biggest themes that organizations are talking about is how to leverage their technology investments to do more with their current levels of resources.
Speaking with CallTower’s Chief Revenue Officer, William Rubio, he tells UC Today that the market has matured in the past two years.
“More and more organizations have transitioned to more robust cloud-based UCaaS solutions that have allowed them to centralize more of their operations onto their Microsoft Teams environment,” explains Rubio. “They now have their conferencing, presence, IM, and other services all on one platform that their employees can use from the office, at home, or on the road.”
“Decision makers want to know how to squeeze more value out of their investments and help their teams increase efficiency,” he says. “Everyone is talking about how Microsoft Co-Pilot is going to take this all to the next level with their employees doing more with the same resources, working more efficiently, automating rote tasks. Organizations understand that if they can simplify their communications, they can gain more value. This means tightening up operations and stimulating growth.”
In his conversations with customers, Rubio says that the next step that they are looking at is enabling voice for their Teams.
“The leadership that we are speaking with understands the value in having all their communication components all in one place,” he says. “They know that being able to cut out extra steps when it comes to reaching someone quickly or looping them into a call can save valuable time and push growth.”
Some of the uses that customers are seeing, according to Rubio, include:
- Connecting with colleagues quickly over a phone call or instant messaging as opposed to email for faster answers, letting them get back to customers or prospects faster.
- Reducing the complexity of adding people to a call from separate solutions
- Streamlining connectivity across hybrid working environments
While there are plenty of clear advantages to enabling voice for Teams, Rubio does say that implementing this change can come with some challenges.
Challenges to Enabling Voice for Microsoft Teams
Like most difficulties in implementing new changes within a company, the challenges are mostly human and organizational. The actual technical enablement is the easy part.
Opposition to New Services
Despite the convenience of enabling voice for Teams, some members of your organization may not want to add another software application for their voice. Given the sheer number of UCaaS solutions, plus email and everything else, people are in a notification overload.
With all of the pings and beeps, it can be hard to actually be productive. So for many, a new service is just one more place to look when they simply want to communicate.
Who Owns Voice?
Voice is not always owned by one party, so making the decision to enable voice in Teams may be a bit complicated. In some cases, IT owns voice as part of the overall tech stack, but it can differ from organization to organization, where some others may have voice owned by another department.
Having more stakeholders, each with their own priorities and preferences can draw out even an easy decision. Getting them to work together and get to the final decision can be difficult.
So what is the right way forward for overcoming some of these challenges?
Understand Stakeholder Needs and Get Buy In
A couple of tips for a more effective implementation of enabling voice for Teams.
Get Buy In
Every department has its own needs and will therefore have different preferences for how they want to run voice and UCaaS in general. So before you start investing time and resources into this project, speak to them and understand the constellation of needs.
It seems intuitive, but you are more likely to succeed if you make people feel a part of the process. This will also help increase the likelihood of them using the services as intended afterwards.
Know Your Environment
In some cases, like M&As, or simply because people have their own preferences for platforms, an organization can have more services in their environment than they are aware of.
Shadow IT poses security risks, not to mention the costs.
While you are doing your listening tour, identifying the stakeholders and who owns voice in your organization, try to figure out what they are using right now.
Consolidate and remove what you can.
Streamline, Consolidate, and Communicate Effectively
Some thoughts on personal preference vs company policy when it comes to choosing how to communicate.
At the end of the day, everyone is going to have their own preferences for the applications they use.
Local culture will also have an impact on it. Outside of the United States, WhatsApp is an integral part of how societies run everything from work to parent groups to parts of the military. Good luck getting those folks not to use WhatsApp for at least some proportion of their work communication.
Your focus should be on making sure that everyone understands what kinds of communication should go on which platform. Try defining what is supposed to be on Slack or Teams and when a call should be on Zoom. The point of communication is to clearly communicate and be productive. If your people do not know where to go to communicate, then you are going to run into wasted time and effort.
The work world is turning towards platformization and away from disparate services. Consolidating more of your tools in one place and removing the steps to be productive should be the goal. Not to mention the cost savings on having multiple services. But it needs to be balanced with organizational knowledge of who your team is and what works for them.
Without the dialogue and buy-in, your efforts and investments will go to naught.
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