Integrating Microsoft Teams & contact center? All you need to know

Hey folks,

Welcome back to another addition of the Always On CX:EX newsletter. Appreciate you joining us!

We're back with a highly relevant breakdown of a recent podcast episode with Irwin Lazar from Metrigy . He joined Gidi Adlersberg and host, Josh Chronister to share his research and findings in a recent report on Integrating Microsoft Teams and Contact Center.

?? To read the report right now, click here: Successfully Integrating Microsoft Teams and Contact Center (audiocodes.com)

Let's jump into the topics of the episode

How do you see unified communications and contact center converging? What is causing companies to want to integrate and unify these platforms?

• Nearly 44% of companies in our research plan to converge UC and CC, but at the same time we see significant growth in Teams, especially Teams Phone.?
• The goal is to best converge contact center and UC to eliminate barriers between agents and back-office, and to support enabling contact center features for groups outside of traditional contact centers (e.g. “informal” contact centers).

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Microsoft has clearly stepped into the contact center market with both the Queues App and Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Where do you see these two fitting in?

• Microsoft announced the Queues App in March of 2024 and previously, Dynamics 365 Contact Center. Dynamics 365 Contact Center is aimed at larger companies using the Dynamics CRM platform and isn’t based on Teams.
• Microsoft Queues enhances existing Teams Phone queuing capabilities to enable companies to view statistics about their queues, distribute configuration and management of queues outside of IT, and to view caller information for those waiting in a queue, all within the Teams app.
• But Queues isn’t a true contact center platform and requires purchase of the Teams Premium license. It doesn’t support skills-based routing or natural language or AI-powered IVR, nor does it support non-voice channels, and it lacks reporting and connectivity to other business applications such as CRM.

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What additional features / functionality would drive a company using Microsoft Teams Phone to add on additional contact center capabilities?

• Integrated agent experience so that agents can manage all their communications from within Teams, as well as the ability to support multi-channel engagement, advanced reporting, and advanced IVR.? Really all the capabilities that Queues and Teams natively lacks.

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There’s nearly 30 Microsoft Teams certified contact centers now. At some point features become a commodity. How should customers evaluate competing Teams contact centers?

• Agent experience and integration, is the Teams CCaaS leveraging Azure Communications Services for calling and contact center?
• How integrated is platform management with Teams?
• How well does the solution support Azure services for PSTN connectivity?
• What additional features are available (e.g. recording, AI, reporting, omnichannel, etc.)
• Flexible billing options including usage-based and pooled licenses

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AI is quickly becoming a key element of the contact center. Where do you suggest organizations should start – with the agent or customer experience?

• Our research shows more than half of companies are already using AI in the contact center and most plan to use it in the future. The biggest area of benefit right now is improving agent experience and productivity, but happier, more productive agents leads to better customer experience, so it’s not mutually exclusive.

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Want to watch the full conversation on integrating Microsoft Teams & contact center?

Check it out here:

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