Customer service is the number one differentiator in any industry. Around 90% of Americans use service quality as a factor in deciding which brands to buy from. A further 58% of consumers say they’ll switch companies because they weren’t happy with the service they received.
Unfortunately for brands, delivering a consistently incredible experience for customers can be quite the challenge. Now more than ever, your customers expect fast, efficient, and personalized experiences on a multitude of service channels. Meanwhile, companies are struggling to stay ahead of unexpected peaks in demand, changing communication trends, and the shift to hybrid work.
To outshine the competition, companies need a CX solution capable of uniting employees, aligning conversations, and maintaining consistency in customer journeys.
Enter Microsoft Teams.
How Microsoft Teams Enriches Customer Service
Boasting around 250 million monthly active users, 80 million monthly active phone users, and an ever-growing community of dedicated fans, Microsoft Teams has changed the way we communicate. As the solution at the front line of digital transformation, Microsoft Teams is connecting distributed employees with chat, file sharing, video conferencing, and calling tools.
Companies are beginning to see the benefits of expanding their Microsoft Teams investments by using the technology for Customer Service.
Here’s how today’s companies can use Microsoft Teams to transform customer service.
1. Connect Your Workforce
One of the biggest challenges facing companies today when it comes to ensuring excellent customer experience, is making sure that a newly distributed team of dedicated employees remains connected, and empowered. Today’s call center agents are working from a variety of environments, often not in the same space as their colleagues. Yet the ability to work consistently as a team is crucial to ensuring your employees can quickly provide solutions to customer problems.
As a tool for collaboration, Microsoft Teams is excellent for bringing different segments of the workforce together to creatively solve customer problems. Team members can share files, screens, and information instantly to drive faster issue resolution.
A contact center built specifically for Microsoft Teams extends this functionality and ensures companies can route conversations to the right agent first-time around. This improves the chances of your company delivering the right kind of service in a timely manner.
2. Empower Agents
Microsoft Teams doesn’t just enhance agent performance by allowing them to connect with their colleagues. One of the biggest benefits of Microsoft Teams is its flexibility. Choosing an API-first architecture for your Microsoft Teams Customer Experience solution will allow you to build a contact center environment specifically made to empower your employees.
You can use connectors to provide agents with access to useful information from CRM systems and other business applications. The Microsoft Teams environment can even support agents by giving them access to a range of intelligent tools, like AI bots capable of quickly surfacing information about a customer’s previous purchase or issues. Around 79% of customers say being able to engage with knowledgeable agents is important.
Working with a professional Microsoft Teams contact center solution provider will ensure you can leverage all the best features of the Teams ecosystem, with the extra tools required to deliver unforgettable customer service.
3. Improve Productivity and Engagement
In an environment full of hybrid employees working to serve customers across different environments, a Microsoft Teams contact center can transform your CX approach. By building your contact center solutions into Microsoft Teams, you create a single pane of glass environment, where employees can easily track conversations from different channels in the same space.
Microsoft Teams can be extended to include multiple channels, like email, chat, Facebook, and even WhatsApp, so you can provide the same consistent experience to customers regardless of the channel. At the same time, real-time analytics features and Power BI reporting allows you to track the experiences of your customers at every stage of the customer journey.
To enhance the performance of employees, you can tie in wallboard solutions and agent dashboards, where team members can monitor crucial metrics in real-time and work to achieve the best business outcomes.
4. Support Workforce Management
Part of offering excellent customer experience in the modern world is making sure managers and supervisors can support and guide employees. This can be extremely difficult in an ever-changing business landscape, but Microsoft Teams can make things a lot easier. Not only does the Teams environment give employees a way to stay connected and engaged in any environment, but it offers access to useful tools like Shifts for schedule management, and Microsoft Viva for engagement.
Combine your Microsoft Teams environment with the right contact center technology, and you can access even more features to track performance and enhance business outcomes. For instance, supervisor insight tools can allow business leaders to maintain live conversation insights, and deliver coaching to agents in real-time, across any channel.
You can access tools with barge-in and whisper functions, to ensure agents always get the support they need when they’re struggling with difficult conversations. When an employee does well, managers can use tools like “Praise” to recognize achievements and reward results.
5. Make Better Customer Service Decisions
Microsoft Teams is an excellent environment for communication and collaboration, but it can also be a powerful tool for collecting information about your customers. With a certified partner for Microsoft Teams, companies can transform their UCaaS environment into a combined solution for UCaaS and CCaaS, allowing for better end-to-end visibility and decision making.
Tools like Buzzeasy for Microsoft Teams provide today’s teams with a complete omnichannel contact center, where agents can interact with clients across Skype, Facebook, email, webchat, and phone calls, all in one space. With every channel aligned, you can immediately see your customer’s journey, and get a better understanding of what it takes to deliver amazing experiences.
Access to additional tools for reporting and analytics ensure you can continue to strengthen the performance of your team and implement new service strategies as your knowledge of your customer evolves.
When To Use Microsoft Teams to Support Customers
There are all kinds of benefits to using Microsoft Teams as the ecosystem for your customer experience strategy. Here are just some of the reasons why you might decide to expand your Microsoft investment with a contact center and customer experience solution:
- You want to unlock new avenues for customer experience: A Microsoft Teams contact center can make it easy to access omnichannel chat and customer service environments. You can align your voice and digital channels, and invest in new strategies like self-service chatbots and automatic call-back.
- Customization is important to you: The open and flexible Microsoft Teams ecosystem makes it easy to add new features as your business evolves. You can access proactive reach strategies for outbound calling and sales campaigns, and use smart routing to improve your chances of the first-time resolution for service issues. Endless integrations and APIs means there’s no limit to what your Microsoft Teams solution can do.
- Your team already uses Microsoft Teams: If your team spends most of their time in Microsoft Teams already, they’re going to feel comfortable using the same technology for customer service and support requirements. Implementing a Microsoft Teams contact center into a business already using Microsoft Teams often ensures a shorter ramp-up time for employees and a faster path to positive results.
- It’s time to outshine the competition: With features like customer surveys to help you connect with your target audience, SMS campaigns, and even unique chat systems built to create human connections with your audience, a Microsoft Teams strategy can ensure you outshine your competition every time.
- You’re looking for better insights: A custom-made Microsoft Teams contact center solution can help you to develop better insight into your customer service strategy. You can access analytics that helps you to understand the customer journey and use real-time metrics and insights to track employee performance.
Could you benefit from using Microsoft Teams for customer service? Reach out to Geomant today to see how we can transform your service strategy with a flexible solution built for your team.
