Think Microsoft Teams is just an excellent solution for synchronizing distributed teams and improving collaboration? Think again. Thanks to an ever-increasing range of customer engagement tools, apps, and features, Teams is becoming a customer experience powerhouse.
Not only are there endless ways to combine your UCaaS and CCaaS strategy with contact centers for Microsoft Teams, but there are countless apps and tools companies can use in Teams to enhance the entire customer journey. From dedicated customer data platforms to apps that allow users to connect with customers through any channel (from SMS to video), the options are endless.
Plus, Microsoft even offers its own range of tools for customer engagement, from Microsoft Dynamics (integrated with Teams), to the new Queues app.
Combining Microsoft Teams with your customer engagement strategy could be the best way to boost productivity, customer satisfaction and efficiency in your workplace. So, how do you choose the right tools? Here’s your step-by-step guide.
Step 1: Define Customer Engagement Strategy Stakeholders
First, you’ll need to identify who in your company is responsible for enhancing customer engagement with the right apps, tools, and features in Teams. Remember, keeping customers engaged doesn’t just mean giving them a great customer service experience.
Countless employees and teams will be involved in your strategy. Your marketing team will need apps to create and personalize campaigns designed to capture, nurture, and convert customers. Your sales team will need tools to help them reach out to leads and follow up with opportunities. You may also need to consider the requirements of field engineers, product development teams, and subject matter experts.
Bring stakeholders from each customer-focused department together, and find out what kind of tools and apps they’re currently using outside of Teams. This will help you identify the solutions you need to create a single hub for productivity within the platform.
Step 2: List Existing Microsoft Customer Engagement Tools
Microsoft Teams isn’t a dedicated contact center solution on its own. That’s why Microsoft partners with so many world-leading vendors to enable contact center functionality within Teams. However, this doesn’t mean that there aren’t customer engagement tools in Microsoft’s ecosystem.
If you’re already using Microsoft Dynamics, then you can connect the sales, customer service, marketing, and other features of this platform with Teams directly. This gives you an excellent way to enhance collaboration between teams, and boost productivity. Employees can even launch Microsoft Teams conversations from Dynamics with a single click.
Elsewhere, Microsoft offers access to tools like the Queues app, for managing incoming and outgoing calls. There are Copilot solutions specifically designed for sales and customer service teams, as well as auto attendant solutions built into Teams. Identify what you already have in your Microsoft stack, so you know where to focus your attention when sourcing third-party tools.
Step 3: Set Customer Engagement Goals
Once you’ve unified your stakeholders, and examined your existing Teams ecosystem, the next step is to identify the priority “goals” you want to achieve with customer engagement tools. For instance, do you want to:
- Empower sales teams: With access to comprehensive customer data, scripting tools, and solutions that help them to proactively connect with and nurture customers?
- Enhance customer service: With apps that allow you to interact with customers on any channel, create custom chatbots, and enhance routing strategies.
- Upgrade marketing campaigns: Using solutions that make it easy to create, and run personalized marketing strategies from within Microsoft Teams.
- Strengthen productivity: By helping teams from across the organization to collaborate, share data, and work together consistently on customer experience.
- Access AI: To boost engagement with real-time transcriptions, sentiment analysis, conversation summaries, and personalized content creation.
Step 4: Explore Available Tools for Teams
Now you’re ready to start exploring the various customer engagement tools, apps, and solutions built specifically for Microsoft Teams by third-party vendors. The first thing to focus on here is finding features that will help you to achieve your specific goals.
For instance, if you want to improve customer experience, you might concentrate on finding a contact center solution for Teams that includes intelligent IVR features, call routing, omnichannel capabilities, call recording and monitoring.
If you’re looking for ways to boost conversions and customer retention, you might look for apps that help you unify customer data, create advanced customer journeys, and track sentiment. Once you’ve found tools with the right selection of features, compare them based on:
- The vendor’s reputation: Does the vendor have a strong reputation for developing advanced, cutting-edge technology? Do they offer end-to-end support with companies using Microsoft Teams integrations, and allow you to customize your experience?
- Flexibility: Will the customer engagement tools you choose integrate seamlessly with solutions outside of Microsoft Teams? For instance, can they integrate with your CRM system, workforce management tools, and ERP software?
- Scalability: How easy is it to build on your customer engagement strategy with these tools? Can you add new users, create automated workflows, and explore new channels with ease?
Step 5: Be Ready to Innovate and Evolve
The customer engagement tools available for Microsoft Teams today are constantly evolving. Countless vendors are taking advantage of new Microsoft innovations, such as Copilot, and the Azure AI landscape. Some are also building their own AI tools, giving companies access to intuitive automated workflow builders, and investing in new capabilities.
The best way to make sure you can stay one step ahead, is to be ready to evolve. Pay attention to the customer engagement metrics you can gather from both Microsoft Teams, and your connected apps. Experiment with new strategies for reaching customers throughout their journey with your brand on different channels. Explore the benefits of using AI for proactive sales and customer service strategies, and enhanced employee productivity.
Remember to think beyond the contact center. Integrating Microsoft Teams with everything from help desk solutions, to customer data platforms, CRMs, and marketing tools will help you to build a comprehensive strategy for attracting, converting, and retaining customers.
Invest in Customer Engagement Tools for MS Teams
Microsoft Teams is more than just a collaboration tool. It’s a flexible cloud-based hub companies can use to not only boost productivity and efficiency, but create incredible customer experiences. By combining Microsoft’s own customer engagement tools with the solutions offered by third party vendors, you can transform your team’s performance, and convert and retain more customers.
As Microsoft continues to introduce new features for Teams, and new partners join the ecosystem, Microsoft Teams could become the ultimate platform for end-to-end customer engagement.
