Microsoft Teams’ explosive growth to 270 million monthly active users in five years has made it a heavyweight in the collaboration space.
But what is less clear is the role Teams, and Microsoft’s broader portfolio, will play in the contact centre.
Teams does have basic contact centre-like features such as call queuing and auto attendant, but Microsoft has also given certification to a handful of specialist CX vendors that it trusts to deliver a quality contact centre integration with Teams.
And then there is Dynamics 365 Customer Service which has been given a voice channel by Microsoft, creating what the vendor says is an “all-in-one digital contact centre”.
A company may know they want to standardise on Teams across UC and CC, but they may not know how to get there – while retaining all the tools they need to deliver a fantastic service to their customers.
This is where Five9 and Onecom partner to deliver a solution built around Teams, but with the power of Five9’s cloud-based CX technology underneath.
Both businesses acknowledge that Teams has changed the game from an internal communication and collaboration perspective – but agree that it is not enough on its own to run a business-critical contact centre.
“Teams is an absolutely fantastic collaboration tool,” Nick Beardsley, Enterprise Director at Onecom told UC Today.
“It’s won the desktop space and almost become the default standard, and nine out of 10 people we speak to are using it, but it is not a contact centre.
“If a business wants to deliver a contact centre that works in harmony with Teams, they need to purchase a third-party contact centre platform that is certified to integrate”
In essence, the Five9 and Teams integration, delivered by Onecom, brings together a business’ front office with the back office.
For example – a contact centre agent can take a customer call powered by Five9 CX technology. The agent may need to speak to someone in the back office, perhaps in the finance team. They can do this within Teams, giving them visibility of the finance colleague’s presence and access to chat functionality.
The outcome is that the agent can solve the customer’s problem at the first time of asking, rather than having to follow up with an email or call back – therefore demonstrating the value of entwining a business’ CX and UC platforms.
The importance of the Channel
An argument for a company wanting to buy all their UC and CC technology from one company is ‘simplicity’.
IT departments are under more pressure than ever, and it’s undoubtedly more straightforward to manage platforms from one vendor than a dozen.
This is where partners like Onecom come into play by acting as that one vendor, according to Five9 VP of Partner Sales Thomas John.
“A company might be using Teams as a UC tool, Five9 as a contact centre, then they’ll have a CRM platform, and suddenly before they know it, they’ve got so many different proprietors that it becomes impossible to manage,” he said.
“Onecom provides a single point of contact for billing, deployment, customer service… the customer knows they can get everything from Onecom; I don’t like the phrase ‘one throat to choke’, so I say it’s ‘one back to pat’.
“That can be reassuring at any time, but particularly when there’s already a bit of nervousness around moving from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud.”
Lines Blurring
It’s no secret that the lines between unified communications are blurring. Companies are exploring ways to bring Teams into the contact centre, and several vendors offer combined UC-CC platforms.
Meanwhile, the likes of Zendesk and Talkdesk have expanded out of the contact centre space into internal communication, while Zoom recently launched its contact centre offering to build on its UC success.
The outcome for businesses is choice – which, although not a bad thing, can make it challenging to choose the right solution (or combination of solutions).
Five9 and Onecom’s combined strategy is simple: Businesses have already chosen Teams for UC, so they combine it with best-in-class CX technology.
This is delivered from Onecom’s OneCloud, which bundles Teams, the Five9 Intelligent Cloud Contact Centre, Microsoft’s Direct Routing and other enterprise tools into one managed service – giving businesses everything they need in a package akin to buying from one provider.
“There is no point having a single platform that does both UC and CC when the customer has already decided they want Teams,” Beardsley said. “So, you can have a UC play in your contact centre, but that’s not really what the customer wants.
“What we give them with Five9 is choice. They can connect to Teams, but they can also connect to Zoom if they’ve made that decision already, or we can connect to their CRM.
“Customers want a single service. That is what we deliver; we just do it on best of breed”
“The reason Onecom chose to partner with Five9 is they have the whole contact centre stack. They can give voice, digital, workforce planning, speech analytics. That is where the market is going.”
Find out more about the Onecom Partnership with Five9 here.
