Efficiencies, productivity gains, user experience enhancement: enabling enterprise voice calling via Microsoft Teams is all give, give, give.
However, the minute the box is ticked on the complex yet instantly-impactful implementation phase, focus must turn to the equally-important everyday management.
Allow the intensity of interest in the migration to dip, and soon the net benefits of this most transformational of projects can begin to wane.
Adoption rates can slow, manual processing costs can be stubbornly impossible to reduce, and much-heralded efficiency improvements can be a challenge to deliver.
Maintaining the transformational momentum is vital, particularly for large enterprises for whom the economies of scale are significant and the return on investment stakes are high.
Smart tooling and clever automation – as well as a cohesive management plan supported by experts – have the capability to minimise any post-implementation slow-down.
“Pre-migration and during the initial implementation, there is rightly a focus on the benefits – it’s hugely important for that to continue to be the case thereafter in order for those benefits to manifest themselves,” says Tim Jalland, Solution Manager at leading digital workplace management software provider VOSS Solutions, which is perfectly placed to help organisations capitalise fully on their Microsoft Teams Voice functionality.
“The more automated and agile the ongoing management phase, the more productive and predictable the overall migration.”
One big opportunity for automation within most large organisations is in the area of joiners and leavers, and the associated number management.
For example, a large multi-region organisation with, say, 10,000 employees and a 5% churn rate can generate significant daily demand on the system. Scripting languages, detailed configuration, and multiple applications and components around the organisation can create serious complexity.
Applying appropriate workflow automation can see ticket resolution time reduced by up to 65%. And, when you consider that, often, up to 80% of tickets relate to just the top five or 10 use cases, it is easy to see how targeting a specific challenge like user onboarding/offboarding can have a major impact.
“Multi-step, manual processes when onboarding, offboarding, and managing numbers requires resource-heavy human intervention which can quickly begin to negate the efficiency gains that the migration was designed to deliver,” says Jalland.
“It can creep up on organisations. They run the migration project and then sort of drift into the everyday management phase. Then, six months downstream, they find they have a cost burden building up and they are highly dependent on a small number of central skilled technical resources.”
The area of adoption, too, provides opportunity to leverage the power of everyday management automation.
“It’s important to track adoption and usage of the new functionality to ensure people are using the new tool set properly and that it is delivering the required return on investment,” says Jalland.
“As an example, with VOSS, it’s possible to drill down into the last four weeks of new employee additions and assess if they are coming up to speed. If they are not, actions can be automatically created for proactive follow up. If a joiner’s process has been automated, the capture of that data and the interpretation of that insight can be a second, automatic step.
“The same analysis has the potential to surface inefficient usage or dormant licensing issues which could be having an unnecessarily negative impact on monthly costs. This has proven hugely valuable to our customers, often saving them hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.”
There’s no doubt that migrating voice functionality to Microsoft Teams is an option laden with opportunity. However, it is also clear that those opportunities are only fully-maximised by organisations that place as much emphasis on everyday management as they do on migration itself.
Get both right, and effective and long-lasting transformation is assured.
To learn more about how VOSS can automate your user onboarding and offboarding process, please click here.
