It has been a year of stellar growth for Microsoft Teams. Since its launch back in 2017, Redmond’s answer for unified communications has risen in popularity among users of Office 365, meshing a suite of handy collaboration tools into an already familiar environment for Microsoft customers.
In early November of 2019, CEO, Satya Nadella, took to the stage in New York to announce that Teams had achieved 54% growth to reach a rate of 20 million daily users, blowing away expectations as they expanded their lead over competitors like Slack.
And then COVID-19 struck, abruptly shifting nearly all work to remote and necessitating a rapid pivot by companies in order to keep their operations running.
It also led to a surge in demand for collaboration solutions, sending use of Teams skyrocketing to a reported 75 million daily active users by the end of April. Personally, we like the odds for the “over” bet on their next update.
For all its popularity, Teams still only provides a part of the picture for how organizations get work done since it lacks a voice component. This is where Microsoft’s Gold Partners like CallTower are able to offer Direct Routing, filling in Teams’ capabilities gaps.
The ability to make calls from anywhere through Teams has unsurprisingly become increasingly relevant during the sudden switch to remote work. With Direct Routing, teams can make and receive calls from anywhere, all without leaving their Microsoft environment.
A leading UCaaS solutions provider, CallTower has been offering Direct Routing for Microsoft Teams since November 2018. In February of this year they added service for GCC High customers. CallTower’s relationship with Microsoft goes all the way back to 2008, having supported older versions of voice services like Skype for Business and all the way back to legacy services like Microsoft OCS.
Along with Direct Routing, CallTower works with their customers to understand what their requirements are, keeping in mind that they may vary from department to department.
CallTower’s Chief Revenue Officer, William Rubio, tells UC Today that, “With Teams, organizations want to make sure that they can still communicate with all their employees, whether it be through instant messaging, video, conference calls, email, checking calendars to set up meetings, etc. But when we start to do a discovery process with them, we often find that they need a contact center solution or have requirements for paging phones, a receptionist console, faxing, and other features that Teams might be missing.”
Along with their expanded offerings that they can provide from their partnerships with communications providers like Cisco, CallTower works with organizations on making their transition to a cloud-based UC solution and not just on a single set of products.
“It’s not about providing a product but an end-to-end solution” says Rubio. He explains that he sees their value in not just providing a technology, but helping his customers extract the most value from their licenses. “We work with customers to securely implement voice with Teams, train their employees, and of course provide support with our in-house team of Microsoft certified engineers that can actually answer questions themselves to resolve issues if they come up.”
“In fact, 86% of help requests that come in are resolved that same day”
One of the main challenges that Rubio says that CallTower helps organizations overcome is in actually getting their employees to use the new technology to improve the way that they work.
“Customers are always asking how can we adopt this solution more within the organization?” he tells UC Today, adding that, “There’s always that issue of having great tools with lots of bells and whistles but nobody is using them. So training is a key aspect of what we bring to the table.”
For achieving the best results, Rubio suggests carrots over sticks, suggesting quizzes at the end of training where employees can win prizes for right answers.
However, at the end of the day, the most effective path appears to be speaking to employees like respected professionals.
“Our advice that customers say has had the most success is when they show the employees how these platforms have a purpose like making doing their job easier,” he says, adding that, “It really changes the demeanor of the employees when you explain to them how and why using these solutions will let them work smarter and more efficiently, as opposed to just talking at them because a decision was made to use those tools.”
