It’s the juggernaut upon which a growing number of businesses now rely.

Once a stand-alone internal collaboration tool, it is now an all-singing, all-dancing cloud-powered platform capable of transforming the way everyone communicates.

But how many businesses are really leveraging the smarts of Microsoft Teams? How many have it at the very heart of their communication ecosystem? And how many have integrated it with other business-critical components?

The resulting dramatic enhancements to productivity and efficiency are there for the taking – all they need is a Managed Service Provider with the solutions, the partnerships, and the expertise to make it all happen.

“Disparate, siloed systems that users have to have to manage, maintain and train on are now a thing of the past – instead, people want the simplicity of having everything in one place,” says Matt Tancred, Head of Sales Specialists at leading managed IT provider Daisy Corporate Services, which is helping thousands of UK mid-market and enterprise businesses derive huge added value from their Microsoft Teams investment.

“Teams is where a growing number of people now live day-to-day. Their connections are all there, their communication and collaboration functionality is all there, their whole office suite is all there. Third party add-ons that provide additional user-specific capabilities such as voice calling, security, governance, and analytics can also be easily integrated. With the right solutions and the right Managed Service Provider, businesses can put Teams at the heart of their UC story.”

Of course, deployment and adoption are key. Technological change is often hard to manage, and end users crave a frictionless experience.

“Microsoft products have the same look and feel, and people learning to use new software like that kind of familiarity,” says Ella Goodheart, Microsoft Sales Specialist at Daisy.

“For example, adding voice calling to the Teams’ interface is really easy for users to pick up. It’s fast and seamless for IT departments to roll out because they don’t really need to do much teaching. For users, it’s intuitive and feels the same.”

On the flip side, licencing Teams efficiently can be a complicated business, especially for businesses that do not have in-house experts with knowledge of the various nuances. Again, having the close support of a Teams-accredited Managed Service Provider can simplify the complex.

“Efficient licencing avoids unnecessary costs,” says Goodheart. “It’s about understanding an organisation’s processes and identifying which elements of the Microsoft stack will deliver the greatest added value. Having a partner with that licencing expertise can be crucial.”

Seamless integration, too, is an increasingly-critical Teams capability. Many businesses are committed to a range of third-party solutions upon which wider workflows depend. Adding them to a single Teams interface is an important part of delivering enhanced productivity and user experience.

“For example, a business may have some contact centre requirements that are more complex than those that Teams is able to provide on its own,” says Tancred. “There are lots of solutions that bring additional functionality to Teams, whether simple, complex or niche. For us, it’s all about having access to the right vendor partnerships that can address those needs in the most effective ways possible. Where are the gaps in your processes? What could you be doing better? What would make you more productive? What would solve a problem for you? Once you have the answers, you can start to look at how they play into Teams and its integration capabilities.”

For most organisations, voice calling is the lowest-hanging fruit. Swapping a traditional on-premise PBX phone system for Teams-powered voice can save huge cost and deliver an all-round better and more reliable user experience.

“Daisy has decades of voice experience, from small deployments of simple dial tone to managing large contact centre estates,” says Tancred. “But crucially, we have the Microsoft expertise and experience that wraps around that. There is a real value in having a partner that understands what you need from your voice application; that quality and real-time availability are really important; and how to deliver it all.”

Going forward, businesses are also likely to increasingly leverage the benefits of AI-powered communication tools to better-serve their customers and drive further internal efficiencies.

“There are already bots that can be custom-built within Teams, whether that’s using generative AI or predictive AI automation,” says Goodheart.

“It’s just about understanding how an organisation uses Teams, how Teams processes the data, and what the organisation wants to achieve. The technology is there, and we work with partners that specialise in leveraging it.

“Also, Microsoft is and will continue to be at the forefront of AI evolution, so Teams users will benefit from all of that research and development going forward.”

It seems businesses of all kinds and sizes should be using Teams for much more than maybe they are currently. To learn more about how Daisy Corporate Services can help, click here.



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