Extending Teams into your contact centre: 4 keys to a successful migration

Deploying Microsoft Teams within customer service delivers significant benefits, such as increasing collaboration, underpinning hybrid and blended working and ensuring agility by improving integration and information sharing with other departments. All of this helps to create a more unified and efficient experience for customers and agents.

However, extending Teams into the contact centre requires careful planning if you are to unlock its full benefits and drive successful adoption by your people. Here are four important considerations to ensure your migration to Teams in the contact centre delivers success.

1. Analyse existing telephony

To build a new Teams-based infrastructure and to ensure a seamless switchover from your current telephony, whether it is a PBX or an on-premise IP telephony solution, you need to know what you have already, how it works and what it connects to. Start by evaluating your existing infrastructure and map out your current system in detail to understand exactly what you need your new Teams implementation to replicate and enhance.

2. Analyse the wider contact centre environment

Teams is built to deliver telephony, alongside video, chat and file sharing. That means you’ll need to augment it with third-party applications in areas such as contact centre functionality, call recording, operator console, call billing and KPI-based reporting. So be sure to research what’s available and identify what you’re going to need in order to deliver all the functionality you currently have, and want to deploy in the future.

3. Analyse user needs

Failing to meet the requirements of end users is one of the biggest barriers to success when migrating to Teams in the contact centre. Teams can bring significant changes to how agents and supervisors work, which can include switching from physical handsets to softphones/headsets or using new collaboration tools such as chat and video. So, it’s essential to gather input from contact centre leaders, managers and agents to ensure your Teams implementation exactly addresses their needs.

Plan a step-by-step approach with user acceptance testing, training and onboarding baked-in to ensure buy-in across the organisation. People-based factors are as important as the technology and you have to bring everyone with you. For example, if you are switching to headsets, you could create a model office to let agents try them themselves – and give them a choice in what is rolled out. Involving everyone in decisions increases buy-in and acceptance.

4. Pick the right partner

Introducing Teams into the contact centre brings different challenges to deploying it within other departments. For example, contact centre implementations are not just about supporting one-to-one voice communication – customer service teams and processes have complex voice rules and require omnichannel functionality.

That means that working with the right partner is essential to bridge any gaps and get the best out of Teams in the contact centre. Select a partner that has a strong, long-term relationship with Microsoft, with accredited technology and who is happy to show you examples of where it has successfully integrated the contact centre with Microsoft for existing clients.

Investing the time and effort in up-front research and planning and selecting the right partner will help ensure your Teams roll-out delivers. Tune in to our on-demand webinar to find how what to look out for to achieve a successful migration.