As the workplace continues to evolve, countless organizations are searching for efficient ways to unify their teams and unlock agility in the cloud. Microsoft Teams Phone, working seamlessly alongside the Teams collaboration platform, offers a valuable option for business transformation.
The solution extends the capabilities of Teams to include enterprise-grade calling features, such as Private Branch Exchange (PBX), and auto-attendants, allowing companies to make, receive, and manage calls within the Teams interface.
With this solution, companies can improve employee productivity and efficiency, and even reduce costs, by eliminating the need for separate phone systems. However, any major migration comes with its challenges. Here’s how you can address the most common challenges that may emerge when you’re shifting your calling ecosystem into the cloud.
Challenge 1: Limited Insights and Poor Planning
A migration from an on-premises, or separate cloud phone system to Microsoft Teams requires meticulous planning. Companies need to ensure they have a clear view of their current ecosystem, and their needs, so they can configure a cloud environment that adequately supports their teams.
Poor planning, due to a lack of visibility into your current ecosystem, can lead to service disruptions, increased costs, and frustration among users. The key to effective planning is ensuring you have the right level of visibility into your current ecosystem.
A comprehensive reporting and analytics solution, such as the tools offered by Variphy, will help you to determine the bandwidth you need for seamless cloud calling, which licenses you need to purchase, and even which phones and systems you can transfer into your new environment.
With a thorough assessment of your current communication infrastructure and requirements, you can develop a more comprehensive migration plan, align stakeholders, and ensure you’re using your resources effectively during the migration process.
Challenge 2: Preserving Security
While Microsoft Teams features numerous tools and solutions that can help to enhance your security standing, and protect your data, it’s still up to you to ensure your system is configured to minimize risks. The communication data you already have from your existing ecosystems needs to be protected, so you can remain compliant with industry standards.
Without the right strategy in place throughout your migration, you risk data breaches and data loss, which could cause irreparable damage to your company’s reputation. Additionally, there’s a risk that, without adequate access control, unauthorized users could be able to tap into your data.
When launching your migration process, ensure you have end-to-end encryption strategies in place to protect all data in transit. Leverage secure access controls to ensure only authorized personnel can access critical information. Additionally, make sure you conduct thorough security assessments and audits to identify and minimize potential threats.
Challenge 3: Preserving Compliance
Alongside implementing standard security measures, many organizations will also need to consider specific compliance requirements when transitioning to Microsoft Teams Phone. In every industry, there are certain guidelines companies need to adhere to, which influence how they manage, collect, store, and use data.
Failure to comply with these regulations doesn’t just put a company’s reputation at risk, causing them to lose customers and loyalty. It can also lead to legal repercussions and hefty fines. To ensure you can maintain compliance when migrating to a new cloud ecosystem, start with research.
Conduct a comprehensive assessment of the industry regulations your company is subject to, and implement protocols that align with these requirements. It’s also worth ensuring that you can update your systems regularly, to address any emerging changes in standards and guidelines.
Challenge 4: Ensuring Adoption
A transition to Microsoft Teams Phone can significantly improve productivity and collaboration in your workplace. It can help to unify the crucial tools employees need to communicate in a single ecosystem, reducing context switching and data silos.
However, your migration can only generate positive results if your employees are adopting and using your technology. Resistance to change is common in virtually every environment, and failure to adopt new tools can lead to serious issues with productivity, and even compliance.
To overcome this issue, companies need to take a multi-faceted approach to change management. This starts with developing user-friendly resources and training materials that cater to different learning styles, and providing access to ongoing education. Establishing a support system, and requesting feedback from users during the migration can also be helpful.
Additionally, leveraging tools that allow you to monitor adoption rates, and track usage across your new ecosystem will help you to pinpoint any issues with your transition.
Challenge 5: Enabling Scalability
The needs of any business can change drastically over time. The cloud gives organizations more flexibility to adapt to changing market dynamics and requirements. However, it’s still important to ensure you’re implementing an ecosystem that can evolve rapidly to suit your needs.
A Microsoft Teams Phone solution that isn’t scalable enough, could cause significant issues with additional expenses and complexities as your business grows. You may find you’re unable to adopt new technologies that can help you to remain competitive in your industry.
With this in mind, assess your Teams Phone instance carefully, and ensure it can integrate with other applications, adapt to changing business processes, and suit your requirements. If you’re leveraging Direct Routing or Operator Connect, choose a supplier that regularly updates their ecosystem, and invests in research and development.
Challenge 6: Optimizing the Ecosystem
Finally, it’s important to note that deploying a cloud calling solution like Microsoft Teams isn’t the end of your digital transformation process. Rather, it’s the start of an ongoing strategy to enhance and optimize your calling landscape. To ensure you’re implementing the right tools and licenses, keeping costs low, and empowering your employees, you need the right insights.
Accessing comprehensive analytical and reporting tools, like Variphy’s Analytics system for Microsoft Teams, will ensure you can maintain clear visibility into crucial metrics and KPIs such as average handling times, and first contact resolution rates. This ecosystem will help you to monitor and mitigate performance issues, which would otherwise harm employee productivity and customer satisfaction.
It also ensures you can avoid wasting crucial resources, helping to keep operational costs low, without compromising on performance. Consistently use your analytical and reporting tools to preserve the ongoing value of your new cloud communications network, and look for ways to enhance your ROI.
Get Ready to Migrate to Microsoft Teams Phone
The benefits of a flexible and scalable cloud calling solution like Microsoft Teams Phone are difficult to overlook. However, the success of your implementation depends heavily on your approach to optimizing your migration.
The best way to ensure you can access the right results for your team, is to work with an expert in migration and analytics. Companies like Variphy offer access to a dedicated migration team, as well as comprehensive analytical and reporting tools for Microsoft Teams Phone.
With their help, companies can accelerate their cloud migration, and rapidly achieve a strong return on their investment.
