6 Announcements From Microsoft That Make ISVs Toes Curl

Is Microsoft killing it's once thriving ISV ecosystem?

The month of March brought a firehose of changes to the products and services offered natively in Microsoft Teams. Some of them raised a lot of smiles and eyebrows to boot.

With the capabilities now in (New) Teams and bundled with premium license features customers can now benefit from unrivalled value from their investment in Teams alone.

Let's take a look at some of the capabilities that are now available within the Teams Phone product set.

Copilot for Teams Phone

This isn't exactly breaking news, Copilot for Teams Phone was announced back in October 2023 that promised the following benefits to users:

• Call note generation
• List main action points from the call
• Generate call summary
• Suggest follow-up actions

Perhaps the biggest advantage to users with Copilot is that they can interrogate and revisit old phone call conversations to remind themselves on what was discussed, rather than having to call or email that person to recap, saving time and energy.

More about Copilot for Teams Phone

However, the latest announcements around Enterprise Connect were that Microsoft is making available Copilot features for PSTN calls.

This will hopefully bring the same amount of features to Teams Phone Mobile users who answer calls using their native mobile device rather than the Teams app.

It is not inconceivable that Microsoft's other communication arm (Azure for Operators) will start to offer this as-a-service for standard PSTN calls whereby neither caller or callee use Teams.

So watch this space.

Call Queues App

For a few years now the industry identified a gap between the basic call queue features of Teams and a full-blown contact center.

Customers often had several use cases whereby Teams call queues weren't good enough, but the jump to an enterprise contact center seemed excessive.

For customers where the call queue hunting and auto attendant IVR options where good enough for call routing and queuing, but fell short on agent side intelligence needed 3rd party solutions to fill that gap.

Vendors such as Code Software filled the gap that eventually was dubbed "Teams Contact Center Lite" by adding in complimentary features like

• Real-time queue wallboards
• Agent presence
• Agent utilisation analytics
• Call analytics

Microsoft announced at Enterprise Connect their Call Queue Teams app that now offers similar capabilities that these vendors offer.

Now customers can take advantage of native tools within Teams that provide a more seamless experience and easier access to the queue data.

This does come at a cost though, you'll require the Teams Premium license.

More Information here.

Advanced Agent / Supervisor Controls

Keeping the theme on call queues, one of the key reasons for jumping to contact center is the requirement for supervisors to assist their agents and customers with enhanced call controls.

In customer facing calling environments it is common that agents must be supported by supervisors and managers.

Giving the ability for supervisors to listen in, whisper to the agent, and if necessary barge in on active customer service calls is essential for agent training and ultimately customer satisfaction.

Until now, Teams call queues have been unable to offer this capability which forced many customers to purchase contact center suites.

Now, Teams will allow supervisors to barge in, whisper, and listen in to agent calls using the Queues app (I believe), closing the gap between native features and the need for a 3rd party contact center.

This now makes the question: do I need a contact center? a tougher one to ask.

Here are some reasons to still buy a contact center:

• You need skills based routing
• You need automatic dial out
• You need advanced IVR capabilities (keep your place, database dips)
• You need CRM integration with call controls in CRM (Not Dynamics365)
• You need intelligent routing (last agent, priority callers, queue skipping)
• You need Omni-channel (web chat, email, social, webRTC)
• You need deeper analytics for SLA tracking
• You need over the phone payment services

Teams Web Chat (Rumoured)

Talking of omni-channel, on our Callroute website we use Social Intents web chat app that integrates within a team in Teams.

We use this to talk to our customers who visit our site and have a query. It works great, but the agent experience is pretty crap in Teams if I am honest.

For the longest of times I have disliked having to chat to a person via a Teams bot in such situation. Having to at mention the bot's name instead when you're talking to Dave from Bristol is really counterintuitive.

Then keeping the conversation in threads so that you can make sense of the conversation. It gets worse when you're talking to more than 1 person at a time.

In the end, I find myself using the Social Intents web portal instead, rather than Teams because its more natural.

I have heard on the grapevine that Microsoft are working on a native Teams web chat bot that will work hopefully better. I have no details on this, but it makes sense that Microsoft are starting to turn their attention to omni-channel too.

What can we possibly expect from this? I am hoping for:

• Automated, self-service help
• Copilot integration
• Agent hunting
• Escalation from chat to voice / video via Teams meeting
• Native Teams experience for the agent without having to at mention bots
• Ability to handle multiple conversations at once with a limit

What we may get might be something different, or nothing at all. But one thing is for sure, Microsoft is coming for Omni-channel.

Call Analytics

Call analytics has been a necessity for the Teams admin and department managers that measure performance based on call volumes.

To date, reports in Teams Admin Center have been quite basic and can't be accessed by anyone without a Teams admin role making them directly inaccessible to many that need them.

Furthermore, Teams itself only stores call analytics for 28 days, after which they are deleted.

For many customers who are legally bound to store call records for longer and those that require more detailed reporting with enhanced filters, a 3rd party solution is needed.

However, Microsoft now have released a free tool that uses Azure components to build a comprehensive call analytics dashboard using your call data in your Microsoft tenant and subscription.

With a little bit of time and setup you can now get deep analytics into your calling usages over any duration.

• Heaviest to lightest Teams Phone users
• Busiest calling regions
• Call quality averages and identify potential problems
• Average call durations, total volume, and more...

For some, this eliminates the need for 3rd party reporting tools and is perhaps the biggest impacting free tool to have hit the market in recent years.

More information here

Voice Isolation

For years we have been preaching about using high-quality, noise cancelling headsets to boost audio quality and conversations.

Vendors like Poly, Sennheiser, Jabra, etc invest a lot of time and money into making premium headsets that have excelled in reducing the amount of background noise in busy environments.

A few years ago Microsoft tried to give the industry a boost by implementing technology like Krisp which at high level used your computer G/CPU to take out background noise in real time.

They have now taken this to the next level using AI and voice profiling so that Teams can learn your voice.

This now has the benefits of

• Isolating your voice in a crowd so that Teams promotes your voice over all other noises and eliminates unwanted sounds
• Ability for Copilot to provide context against what you said allowing for better recaps and note taking
• Ability for meeting rooms to identify you by voice and video to make front row more engaging

All these work with or without a premium noise cancelling headset. So it begs the question on whether software solutions for noise reduction and audio quality is now enough?

So is Microsoft Killing the ISV Ecosystem?

I don't think that is the real question we're asking. I think it is a buyer led decision that is making Microsoft build into areas that once their ISV partners dominated.

Customers want essentially 3 things:

1. A solution that meets their needs
2. A solution that brings the best value for money
3. A simple operating model with a single bill

When you package these up, the nirvana for a customer invested in Teams is to use native tools where possible, even if that means compromising on their must haves.

If Microsoft make a feature available through Teams premium, then it makes sense in many cases to subscribe to that, rather than looking for a 3rd party alternative to save yourself 2 or 3 bucks a user.

After all, the saving you make may end up costing you more having to manage multiple vendors from setup, adoption, maintenance, support etc.

So the attraction and desire from the buyer to want one throat to choke combined with easy switch on of features and a single bill, customers are willing to make compromises and pay a premium for.

We're seeing this outside of Microsoft too, Zoom, 8x8, RingCentral, and Cisco are now offering a full bodied phone solution that is much much more than plain dial tone.

What does this mean for everyone else?

For sure there are going to be casualties as the market opportunity for every vendor to thrive compresses.

However, disruption and buyer habits drive innovation and where ISV can add value is in the grey spaces that Microsoft et al have yet to fill.

Ultimately what will win you customers is a solution that solves a problem backed up with irresistible overall value propositions that come alongside it.

For example. If you're selling SIP trunks only, don't expect to win against a competitor who will offer the same customer SIP Trunks, Professional Services, Project Management, Migration, and Managed Service.

So in summary, no Microsoft isn't killing the ISV ecosystem. Customer demands are pushing Microsoft to offer more. In turn, Microsoft is pushing its ISVs to innovate better.

Overall this is how we collectively make advancements in technology and always has been.