Vast offices, rows of desks, banks of screens, giant wallboards, dozens of agents…and big phone bills.
For many large enterprises, that’s a reasonably accurate description of their contact center set-up.
For those also still dependent on an on-premises PSTN phone system you could argue that nothing has changed for more than a decade.
Of course, over the past few years, some have at least moved the telephony into the cloud, but even that bold step has – on its own – failed to fully leverage the epic transformation offered by the latest technology.
Not that the contact center space hasn’t embraced the most recent advances.
Two years ago, the pandemic forced enterprises to send agents home to make-shift workspaces on dining tables and in spare bedrooms.
Clever, cloud-based unified communications platforms kept them connected to customers and head office and, for many organisations, ever-evolving UC innovations continue to improve those processes.
But it’s via Microsoft Teams – the largest and most-impactful collaboration platform of all – that the biggest gains can be had.
And when the power of its functionality is teamed with the experience of an expert deployment partner, those gains can be very big indeed.
“Modern businesses understand the benefits MS Teams can bring to their contact center operations but they need to feel fully confident before they take that significant step – when they do, they see that it changes everything,” says Jamie Schwinn, Unified Communications Solution Architect at global enterprise-class contact center and IVR provider ComputerTalk, whose native Microsoft Teams solution ‘ice’ is changing the game.
“It gets them off their legacy platforms, provides them with anywhere, anytime feature-rich functionality and delivers them transformational cost savings.
“No-one is going back to how things used to be.”
ComputerTalk’s ice solution is an all-in-one cloud contact center platform which seamlessly integrates with existing applications and bridges the gap between legacy infrastructure and the modern brilliance of the Microsoft Teams stack.
It gives organizations an alternative to Teams federation by using Teams Direct Routing to send calls to Teams-based agents using a managed SBC network.
With faster call set-up times, it enables users to handle all interactions – voice, chat, email, SMS and social media – all within a single interface.
It saves agents’ time by providing interaction controls and contextual information within the Teams interface and enhances the customer experience by enabling agents to easily view any historical or open CRM tickets.
Also, it expands the call handling functionality to subject matter experts throughout the organization – enabling a more digitally-agile workforce to perform a mix of customer engagement and traditional back-office tasks.
And it quickly responds to changing service metrics via actionable alerts and customizable reports – informing business decisions and helping users strategize for the future.
Outbound dialling, IVR, real-time monitoring and analytics, recording and transcripts, historical reporting, and customer surveys are all there too.
“Every organization’s requirements are different but we have a whole department of engineers and innovators dedicated to responding to those individual needs,” says Schwinn.
“These deployments can be complex but we are flexible and dynamic and can easily and quickly pull in any additional resource needed to get it right first time.
“We have been in the contact centre business for 30 years and we have been partnering and integrating with Microsoft for 15+ years. Our customers rightly derive a lot of confidence from that.
“Combine all of that with the functionality and scale of ice and it’s no surprise that organizations that make the move to MS Teams quickly begin to reap the rewards”
Not that everyone wants to make that move in one leap.
For those nervous about the resilience of the wider Microsoft eco-system, ice can be deployed via a Teams connection which incorporates a PSTN back-up – enabling the continued receiving and answering of calls even if Teams goes down.
The contact centre of the future?
More like the present…
To learn more about how ComputerTalk can help your business leverage the transformational power of MS Teams, visit www.computer-talk.com
