Microsoft Teams is currently the fastest-growing app in Microsoft’s (phenomenally successful) history. Microsoft Teams now has 145 million daily active users around the world, making it one of the most popular UCaaS environments on the planet. For direct routing providers, this demonstrates an incredible opportunity.
Around 80-90% of all companies with a Microsoft Teams strategy are planning on using direct routing to access voice functionality. This instantly opens the door for direct routing providers to connect with millions of potential customers. The question is, how do you differentiate your direct routing solution from the opportunities offered elsewhere in the market? The answer is by taking Microsoft communication solutions to the next level.
There are still gaps in the Microsoft platform for companies looking to use Teams as an all-in-one platform for communication. Even with a direct routing provider to unlock internal communication, Teams is still lacking an internal solution for contact center functionality.
As a direct routing provider, partnering with a certified Microsoft Teams contact center vendor allows you to leverage the full opportunity of the Teams revolution. You can finally give customers the completely unified Microsoft ecosystem they’ve been looking for.
The Opportunity in “Value-added” Options
Today’s companies are racing to the cloud for business continuity, cost-savings, and efficiency purposes. Hybrid employees and global growth have made things like cloud communications a table-stakes investment for most businesses. For today’s direct routing provider, adding calling functionality to Microsoft Teams is just the first step in an incredible path to growth.
Currently, the companies using Microsoft Teams most are also the ones most likely to benefit from a combination of UCaaS and CCaaS functionality. Over a quarter of the companies using Teams belong to the computer software industry, and together, IT services, Government administration, Higher Education, and financial services make up almost half of the ecosystem.
For all of these organizations, there’s a demand to align internal and external communications. IT and computer software companies don’t want to jump between different apps for collaboration, communication, and help desk or contact center support. Bringing contact center functionality into your Microsoft Teams offering is how you position yourself as the ultimate partner for communication transformation.
Why Teams is the Ultimate Value-Add Solution
The Microsoft environment is built for a world where 80% of employee time is spent collaborating, 72% of workers are remote, and 4 times as many devices appear in the standard workplace.
Microsoft Teams stretches across 181 global markets and 53 languages. For resellers, there are multiple opportunities to transition teams from Skype for Business to Teams, migrate companies onto the cloud, and build unified cloud environments.
Bringing Microsoft Teams into your service offering means you can delight clients by:
- Improving operations: Microsoft Teams makes it easy to track business processes, people, and outcomes in one aligned environment, regardless of where employees are.
- Empowering employees: Teams can chat, conference, and meet whenever they need to, working together on projects to achieve the same goals.
- Simplify knowledge sharing: Teams can offer a hub of productivity to remote and in-office workers, with access to various integrations with Microsoft Office tools and third-party apps.
However, Microsoft Teams can only accomplish so much on its own. For companies who want a true ecosystem in the cloud, partners need to be ready to step in with new opportunities.
Combining UCaaS and CCaaS In Microsoft Teams
Countless companies have already bought into the Microsoft Teams ecosystem as a place for working and collaborating in a hybrid landscape. However, there are gaps in the platform when it comes to external communications. Direct routing and operator connect can strengthen your customer’s internal telephony needs, but what about when clients come to you in search of a way to serve their end-users?
The contact center isn’t just a requirement for bigger businesses anymore.
Every company needs a reliable way to serve their customers, and they need a contact center environment that adapts to the remote and hybrid workplace. As employees continue to work from distributed locations all around the world, businesses are turning to resellers for help connecting the customer service team to the UCaaS backend.
A Microsoft Teams contact center is a simple, and effective way to take any UCaaS strategy to the next level. For partners and resellers, Microsoft Teams contact centers enhance your offering, by giving customers a way to serve and support their end-users, while maintaining all the benefits of teams. A Microsoft certified partner like Geomant can build a customized contact center into the Teams environment, which leverages all of the features today’s companies need, such as:
- Omnichannel interactions: Connect with end-users through email, SMS, voice, social media messenger, web chat and more – all in the same place.
- Intelligence: Save your users time and money with smart voice and digital routing to segment, prioritize, and route clients to the correct agent groups, even in a hybrid world.
- Simple management: Monitor the performance of teams within the Power BI reporting landscape, or access real-time insights into the 360-degree customer journey, and employee performance.
- Customization: Working with the right contact center solution for Microsoft Teams means you can leverage an open API-first architecture, ideal for adding unique customizations for end users, as well as crucial integrations with CRM and ERP tools.
- Innovation: Make sure your clients can unlock the benefits of AI self-service solutions, chatbots, and other fantastic tools as their company continues to evolve.
Finding the Right Value-Added Solution
Companies are rapidly discovering that the future of cloud and hybrid work relies on being able to access an aligned, efficient, and effective digital environment. This landscape needs to be aligned not just for back-end interactions, but for customer experience strategies too.
As a reseller or partner, you can bring your customer’s UCaaS and CCaaS together with a contact center solution built specifically for Microsoft Teams. Tools like BuzzEasy for Teams aren’t just a Microsoft Teams “add-on”. The technology allows you to leverage the investment your client has already made in the Microsoft stack with a native, aligned, single-pane-of-glass environment, with no need for any additional application.
If you’re already delivering direct routing to your customer so they can access the full benefits of Microsoft Teams UCaaS, this could be the perfect opportunity for you to take your offering to the next level. The customer can start off with a collaboration and voice channel within Microsoft Teams, then gradually scale up with a contact center solution. If you work with a system integrator like Geomant, you can create a particularly sticky offering because you’re capable of dealing with even the most complicated requests.
A Microsoft Teams Contact Centre solution can even be an excellent opportunity for IT resellers or video conferencing resellers who want to take their service to new heights.
Discovering Additional Revenue Drivers
A Microsoft Teams contact center effectively upgrades the Microsoft solution stack for resellers and their customers, giving you a point of differentiation, a sticky source of extra value, and an opportunity to unlock new sources of incremental revenue. At the same time, your end-users benefit from:
- Improved business continuity, ideal for cloud-based working
- Better team management with remote training, whisper, and barge-in functions
- Flexibility to add and remove contact center features easily
- Better insights and analytics through state-of-the-art reporting
- A centralized communication environment to boost productivity
- An aligned landscape for both contact center and back-office agents
Once you’ve captured the loyalty and appreciation of your customers with a fantastic contact center experience, you can even take the solution a step further, with additional revenue drivers. For instance, why not add a wallboard solution for agent desktops, mobile, and overhead screens? Wallboards will make it quick and simple for agents and business leaders to track valuable metrics in the contact center. They can even improve employee communication and engagement.
Another option might be adding policy-based recording for Microsoft Teams contact center users. A Microsoft-certified provider like Geomant can enable partners to offer recording solutions that are secure, compliant, and easy to access. The recording solution archives all of your customer’s records in an easy-to-navigate landscape for instant playback and auditing.
The right recording solution even helps you to appeal to your customer’s need for data protection, integrity, and compliance demands.
Why Use Geomant for Value Added Services?
The key to upgrading your reseller offering as a direct routing, communications, or analytics reseller with Microsoft Teams contact center technology, is finding the right contact center partner. A certified gold partner of Microsoft, like Geomant, can give you the peace of mind of over 20 years of experience delivering contact center solutions around the globe.
With Geomant, you get an omnichannel contact center built specifically for Microsoft Teams, so your clients can leverage the full benefits of the Microsoft ecosystem, complete with enterprise-level contact center technology. You also have the added peace of mind that comes with ISO 27001 security and Microsoft accreditation.
Is it time to boost your revenue with a Microsoft Teams contact center?
