The July issue of Comms Business explored adding value to Microsoft. Many UK channel partners have been riding the Microsoft Teams growth curve since it took off dramatically during the pandemic.
Since then, the growth has continued, Microsoft now report 320 million Microsoft Teams users globally. Teams plays a central role in the digital workplace for chat, collaboration and content sharing. It’s cloud-based, so accessible anywhere and fully integrated into the Microsoft 365 stack of productivity applications such as Office, Sharepoint, and increasingly, Microsoft’s AI tool, Copilot.
Channel partners that haven’t yet embraced Teams need to jump on the growth curve. The opportunity is bigger than you may think – Teams is not just a collaboration solution, it can play a much bigger role at the core of an organisation’s efforts to improve the employee and customer experience.
As well as collaboration, Microsoft Teams can be an enterprise phone system, contact centre, compliance and interaction recording solution and an AI-powered meeting intelligence platform.
All of which sounds like a great opportunity for channels to deepen and widen their customer relationships by adding more value. So, let’s explore the added-value opportunities:
1) Give Teams a voice
Teams Phone is the only calling solution that is native to Microsoft Teams. For over 20 million users worldwide, Teams has replaced the need for a separate business phone system or PBX, as it makes telephony a fully integrated part of the Teams user experience.
There are several ways that channel partners can enable Teams Phone for their customers –Direct Routing and Operator Connect (for service providers) both allow customers to continue using their existing lines and minutes provider.
Microsoft also offers its own calling plans. Teams Phone helps organisations save money, simplify support and speed up user onboarding compared to running separate telephony and collaboration platforms. Integrating voice with Teams also opens up a host of possibilities with AI-powered applications that leverage voice as a primary interface for customer or employee interaction.
2) Make Teams a CX powerhouse
With the IT shift to cloud services we are seeing a huge increase in the convergence of Unified Communications and Contact Center as a service (UCaaS and CCaaS).
Teams, positioned at the heart of enterprise collaboration, is a powerhouse driving this trend. It has some basic in-built contact centre capabilities, for example call queues, but for more demanding contact centre needs, or indeed relatively simple customer interaction needs such as a helpdesk, sales or customer support department, Teams can be seamlessly integrated with 3rd party contact centres, built in Azure.
This integration facilitates better collaboration between contact centre agents and back-office staff, all of whom play a key role in improving the customer experience. For the channel community, being able to offer contact centre capabilities with Teams “as a service” presents an opportunity for higher margins, recurring revenues and stickier customers.
3) Make Teams meetings a business intelligence asset
In the hybrid workplace the rise of Teams meetings has been phenomenal. Everything discussed in those meetings is a critical business intelligence asset. AI-powered applications that allow automated recording, transcription, minute-taking and analysis of Teams meeting content add huge value to individual participants and business leaders.
For channels, the opportunity is to empower organisations to make meeting content a core business intelligence asset, helping to improve staff productivity and leadership decision-making. That’s a compelling story to take to your customers.
4) Don’t leave compliance and interaction recording behind
In industries such as finance, legal, government and health, recording all interactions is either a regulatory or an industry requirement. When migrating to Microsoft Teams, it is crucial that compliance is maintained and that recording and analytics can cover all Teams interaction modes, whether phone call, video call or chat.
Another AI-powered application that creates added-value for the enterprise using Teams and an additional growth opportunity for channel partners.
The channel opportunity
Channels looking to leverage the multi-stream growth opportunities with Teams need to partner with a vendor who can provide the assurance of Microsoft certification along with years of field experience in helping enterprises on their Teams journey.
AudioCodes Live Platform is a unique SaaS-based service offering that makes it easy for partners to add Teams Phone, deploy an award-winning AI-First Teams-certified contact centre, with interaction recording and AI-powered analytics to improve meeting outcomes.
One platform that offers multiple SaaS Services to simplify and speed up customer onboarding and build additional recurring revenue and margins.