CallTower recently announced the availability of Solgari for Microsoft Teams, offering customers the ability to combine their UCaaS and CCaaS solutions into a single window for agents.
A Teams-native solution for contact centers, Solgari is the first application to live within Teams.
At its core, Solgari provides an out-of-the-box call center experience that organizations are already familiar with, connecting to all of the usual channels including Voice, SMS, WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and more.
Deployed from Azure, call centers can expect to have the service up and running fairly quickly. Using an Open API, organizations can easily integrate it with additional services that they may be using, making the
Integrating with cloud and on-prem CRMs like Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce, Solgari gives a fair amount of flexibility for scaling up or down as the business requires.
“This will definitely be a game changer for customers that are looking for something that’s native within the team’s environment that could give them the full functionality of a cloud contact center solution within Microsoft Teams,” William Rubio, CallTower’s Chief Revenue Officer tells UCToday.
“By empowering agents to utilize two of their primary workload applications in one single-pane-of-glass, they can continue to leverage the power and functionality of Microsoft Teams for a comprehensive collaboration and productivity experience.”
Why Doesn’t Microsoft Teams Have Its Own Contact Center?
My first question in chatting with Rubio about the Solgari in Teams was why is Microsoft skipping the opportunity to provide this service themselves. A naive question perhaps, but I had to ask.
Microsoft wants to be the hub, but doesn’t want to be a voice provider, which is a pretty essential element when you’re running a call center
What they have basically done is provide all of the infrastructure that an organization would need to plug in the call center and voice solution of their choice, integrating easily with the rest of the MSFT environment that they are already using like Teams.
Think about it like Microsoft being the skeleton and the value added resellers that they partner with to provide additional services are the muscles and sinews that make for strong, flexible, and highly capable customer organizations.
3 Advantages for the 2-in-1 Approach
There are of course plenty of good reasons to reduce the number of applications that your team is running, but here are a few that I found to be pretty compelling.
1. Improved UX for Agents
The first benefit is that Solgari provides a much better end user experience for your contact center agents.
Beyond the bonus of having a centralized platform where work gets done, nixing the need to switch between windows, it also dramatically reduces inefficiencies from a business standpoint.
Think about the common duplication of effort that can occur when working on two different applications. Moving to a single screen saves them time, frustration, and allows them to focus on the job at hand.
2. Reduced Risks from Mistakes
Working across multiple applications opens the door not only to lost time, but also potentially to lost data.
Manually moving data or performing other tasks between different applications, sometimes even different windows of the same applications can lead to facepalming-level mistakes.
Moving to a single application does not just reduce the probability of these errors. It effectively eliminates them.
3. Flexible, Low Commitment
And then I think third is the flexibility that it brings from a cost standpoint, that now you have everything integrated within your Microsoft Teams environment overall.
Add to this that it is also one less thing to worry about from an IT standpoint. With such fast implementation and management through CallTower’s customer portal, getting started with Solgari is not going to be a drag on your IT team’s valuable yet limited resources.
Running a Low Risk POC
Speaking with Rubio about how customers are already starting to try out the Solgari solution with CallTower, we got to chatting about the challenges for customers really getting to experience a solid demo before buying.
For organizations, getting a new product into the hands of their actual end users within their team before making a purchase is essential. Without proper buy in from the users, an investment might end up not being a good fit and can be a waste of time and money.
But the challenge is often that running a proper proof of concept POC that goes beyond a demo can be difficult because it requires resources from the buyer’s side.
This can include connecting to their environments and apps, involving IT staff to implement, and can even cause disruption to day-to-day operations while the users (in this case the call center agents) see if they like the tool.
What Rubio suggests is not to integrate the solution too widely. Instead he says to choose a couple of light campaigns on the back end that will not disturb ongoing work but will still allow managers to measure the effectiveness of tools like Solgari for their teams.
If the KPIs fit, then roll out from there.
If you are interested in trying out a POC of your own, or even just checking out a demo of Solgari, reach out to the CallTower team to learn more.
