There are endless permutations of Microsoft Teams contact centre setups, and you can maximise your customer reach by implementing the best solutions currently available.
Ultimately, successful contact centres are all about increasing your communications potential with customers. Several essential parts combine to make this happen, including the appropriate feature, licensing model, compliance solutions, data and policy management, tailored integrations, reporting, routing, support options, and more.
Noor Yousuf, Head of Presales at Resonate, spoke to UC Today on a range of Teams contact centre topics, from how they are currently structured to practical advice for what to look for in a complete solution.
Contact Centres and their Challenges
A contact centre can be loosely defined as a company or department communicating with customers to provide support, sales or other business-related services. Contact centres are differentiated from call centres, which only use phone, by the ability to use multiple communication channels. Omnichannel solutions are an increasingly popular option for contact centres, for example, providing multiple communication channels from voice and video to social media and even the ability to meet with customers in the metaverse.
From an organisational standpoint, Yousuf explains, contact centres usually include a hierarchy of executives, managers, supervisors, and contact centre agents. The size of the call centre will determine the number of agents needed to meet customer demand.
Many providers are now offering integrated contact centre solutions, particularly in cloud environments. These single solutions can offer a host of features, such as workspace optimisation, analytics, call recording, and more. This removes the need to work with multiple vendors, which has become popular for modern companies looking to remove digital silos and simplify their IT systems.
The move to cloud has brought with it challenges, however. Yousuf gave examples of some of the potential difficulties, including rewriting application architecture for the cloud, investing in people and tools needed for successful migrations, training users on the new systems, latency interoperability dependencies on non-cloud applications and possible downtimes. Security is another important aspect for contact centres to look at, and they need to protect customer data and sensitive company information.
Yousuf added: “Adoption can be very tricky as well because it is often people who pose the biggest challenge.
“People tend to resist change, and a cloud migration brings a lot of change and disruption, such as new systems, processes, and even leadership changes as well.
“I would say it brings a lot of challenge, but I am also in favour of going towards the cloud.”
The Teams Contact Centre Experience
Teams already offers some contact centre functionality, including multi-level menus, routing, physical and virtual operators for call forwarding to external numbers and other basic skill-based routing.
The two stand-out features currently available in Teams, according to Yousuf, are auto attendants and call queues. Auto attendants let you set up numerous call routing options based on caller input. Call queues are essentially a waiting space for customers. By combining the two, you can effectively get customers to the right person in the right department.
Apps and automation can also be built into the Teams contact centre experience. Microsoft Azure, for example, houses applications like SharePoint and SQL, which can be used to automate processes. Azure Cognitive Service uses natural language recognition helps to sift through customer requirements to match them with the correct agent. Power BI templates can be used to efficiently analyse call handling times, enabling managers to get an overview and distribute agents accordingly.
What to Look for in a Teams Contact Centre
Yousuf talked us through a whole list of features to look for in a Teams contact centre. As previously mentioned, the fundamental yardstick of success for a contact centre comes down to its ability to communicate effectively with customers. This means meeting them where they are, on the channels they are using.
Text-based chatbots are a prime example. They have become familiar to most customers and, although they mostly provide FAQs which won’t meet every customer’s needs, they do help contact centres by effectively routing the call to the correct agent. This saves time for both the customer and the agent.
Recording compliance solutions can enable you to record customer interactions when you need them and stop recording when payments are taking place, for example.
Transcription, which is well known in Teams, can be used in contact centres, and customer service satisfaction surveys can also be implemented. CRM integrations can also be added, allowing agents to view customer details, previous tickets and any existing issues when a customer calls.
Yousuf explained some of the benefits his own company, Resonate, can offer: “Resonate can offer some great applications, such as an application for call queues and auto attendants where we can automate the whole process of creating and managing those call queues and then providing some power BI dashboard reports as well.
“We are also working with our partners in contact centre space to provide analytics, which are advanced analytics, not just the standard ones. Usually, providers give you out-of-the-box reports but what we do is go the extra mile.
“We provide additional reports and advanced analytics for customers to see how the changes need to happen, where the call handling is happening and how you can change the call flows to make a better user experience for the customers.
“This is where Resonate comes in to help customers looking for advanced and complex solutions.”
Resonate is a key Luware partner, a Partner of Excellence for Anywhere 365, a Microsoft Gold Partner, and Microsoft’s first Teams-accredited contact centre.
To find out more about Resonate’s Teams contact centre, you can download the Resonate eBook here.
