Microsoft caused quite a stir when it announced it would be adding voice channels to Dynamics 365.
The vendor referred to the new offering as an “all-in-one digital contact centre solution”, leaving many wondering if Microsoft is planning a full-blown assault on the customer experience market.
UC Today sat down with Chris Bardon, Chief Software Architect at ComputerTalk, to see how and where Microsoft is positioning the offering.
ComputerTalk’s flagship product is ice Contact Center – an omnichannel contact centre offering that integrates with Microsoft Teams.
Bardon said that, on first view, he doesn’t expect a whole wave of organisations leaving their current contact centres behind for the new Dynamics-based offering.
He expects that it could appeal specifically to businesses that are built to run entirely on Dynamics already.
“I don’t think this is a broad play from Microsoft,” he said. “I think this is very much a product targeted at Dynamics users.
“If you’re a Dynamics customer and your users live and breathe Dynamics, this might make sense, but businesses also need to make sure that Dynamics will give them what they need in a contact centre”
“I think it also depends on buyer expectations. I think the Dynamics offering could do well with businesses that are very CRM-centric and just want to add some very basic contact centre features such as voice.
“Similarly, if you have a company using Dynamics customer records with four people on their help desk, they could probably turn Dynamics voice on and do pretty well, but businesses with specialist contact centres will still need a specialist vendor.”
How Does it Fit with Teams?
An interesting aspect of the news is how the new Dynamics contact centre solution will fit in with a Microsoft software portfolio that includes Teams – which boasts relatively basic CX capabilities and partnerships with a number of CX specialist vendors.
When announcing that voice would be added to Dynamics, Microsoft said that Teams could be embedded into the Dynamics platform but did not go into too much detail on quite how tightly the two would be integrated.
Bardon said that businesses should not underestimate how disintegrated the two platforms actually are.
“They’re separate silos, really,” he said. “What works with Teams and what works with Dynamics are two different things.
“The new Dynamics omnichannel stuff doesn’t work with Teams in the same way as the Teams contact centre does. Your agents in Dynamics are taking calls in Dynamics, not in Teams.
“The only integration is that you can throw a call over the fence to a Teams user; it’s a minimal integration.”
Bardon said that this can make implementations complex for customers because they’d likely need a professional services company to create a bespoke offering and handle the deployment – something that specialist contact centre providers do day in, day out.
He did however say that voice in Dynamics could evolve into a tool for other contact centre providers to work with – similarly to how contact centre providers who may have been expected to compete with Teams now, in fact, integrate with it.
But, crucially, he encouraged businesses in the process of revamping their customer experience to assess what is available outside of the Microsoft ecosystem.
“There is more to the world than Dynamics just like, for us, there is more to the world than Teams.
“Teams is a big focus for our business but there is a large portion of our install base that is not on Teams and that’s ok because we’re still able to provide them contact centre as a service because it’s at our core.
“At the end of the day, it’s about us connecting a company’s customers to their business, in a way that has as low of an impact on the end users as possible.
“I think a lot of customers will take a look – and they should validate it because that will be the right thing for the business, but if you’re a larger business with 50 agents I don’t think Dynamics will scale unless they’re doing something very customised.”
