Plugging Third-Party Integrated Solutions into Teams

UC Today spoke to Ben Donaldson, Solution Architect at CPS

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Plugging Third-Party Integrated Solutions into Teams
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Published: November 2, 2021

Marian McHugh

Technology Reporter

Microsoft Teams has boosted its capabilities exponentially over the past two years, adding and updating features on a regular basis.  

But for all of these enhancements, there is still a need for third party integrated solutions to ensure the platform has the capabilities that users need, particularly for users that require extended functionality that is not natively available in Teams 

In fact, the most common third party integrated solutions for Teams are in the contact centre and call recording spaces, according to Ben Donaldson, Solution Architect at CPS 

Contact centres have historically always had a “very rich” feature set, such as the capability to have a supervisor listen in on an agent’s call, or for a caller to hear what position they are in in a queue and opt to be called back rather than continuing to hold on the line. The list of capabilities is extensive. 

“Microsoft has gone a long way to introduce features within Teams Call Queues and Auto Attendants that provide fantastic automated call distribution and menu based routing, but it’s still not contact centre functionality,” Donaldson told UC Today. 

“For those small organisations that think they need a contact centre, Teams may well have come far enough to do that for them now with its native telephony capabilities, but for those, medium and large scale organisations that have true contact centre requirements, they will still need a third party solution.  

“Microsoft actually has a certification programme; there are plenty of vendors pushing their products into the Teams space, but organisations should definitely pick one that’s been certified by Microsoft.” 

Another popular integrated third party solution for the platform is call recording. Though Teams offers the ability to record calls and meetings, it doesn’t fulfil requirements for those businesses that need recording for compliance and regulatory reasons and who need to be able to retain and discover that data for extended periods of time.  

Other functionality gaps in Teams are around analytics and reporting, Donaldson added. 

“Microsoft is very much in love with this vendor ecosystem,” he said. 

“They don’t hide the fact that Teams won’t do all of these things and that it’s very much an ecosystem and a partner play when it comes to these third party integrated solutions.” 

The main challenge around common integrated solutions is educating customers to know that Microsoft Teams might not be enough for their needs by itself and that these third party solutions are sometimes necessary to deliver the features that they need, said Donaldson. 

What CPS Offers

CPS offer design, implementation, and support of all Teams integrated solution types, not limited to contact centre and call recording solutions.  

“We stay away from farming professional services back to the vendors or other partners, allowing us to operate as a single trusted advisor for an organisation in every aspect of Teams telephony,” said Donaldson. 

“We offer a complete set of Teams telephony professional services and products, which could consist of the implementation of Teams and its voice services, as well as two, three, or a handful of these third party integrated solutions”  

“Because we’re certified and versed in the implementation of all these pieces, it all stays in-house: it’s a single point of contact and a single set of professional services to provide a complete end-to-end solution.”

 

 

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