Three Ways to Accelerate Collaboration in the Contact Center by Integrating Microsoft Teams

Now that we are several months into the global pandemic, most of us have settled into a new normal. For businesses, this means employees—including those in contact centers—are now working, learning, and collaborating remotely.

This new model has required the adoption of tools to ensure employees stay as productive and efficient as when they were in the office. To help, companies have been embracing unified communications applications such as Microsoft Teams, which now boasts 75 million active daily users.

If you’re one of the thousands of companies that has embraced Microsoft Teams for your internal communications and collaboration, have you ever thought about extending it into your contact center?

If not, you should. And here are the top three reasons why.

Boost your agent productivity

When you integrate systems, one of the main goals is to simplify the user experience. The goal of integrating Microsoft Teams into your contact center is no different—you want to make the agent’s job easier.

A typical agent works in multiple systems—their contact center platform, CRM, knowledge bases, company communications systems, etc. Navigating between those systems adds unnecessary time to the interaction and makes it harder for the agent to focus on the customer.

Then as an employee of your company, agents have a completely separate set of systems and tools to interact with, from internal websites and phone systems, to email, conferencing and collaboration tools.

NiCE CXone for Microsoft Teams embeds the CXone agent experience directly into Microsoft Teams for a truly unified agent experience.

Without leaving the Teams application, agents can efficiently handle all aspects of an interaction.

Through the CXone embedded agent, agents can easily:

• Manage interactions using full contact center controls, including hold, conference, @mentions and more
• Connect with Teams users outside of the contact center through a unified directory
• Access frequently used websites and apps through custom workspaces that appear next to the contact center controls
• Chat with Teams users via a shortcut for real-time collaboration

Consolidating the agent interface within the Microsoft Teams application eliminates the time lost navigating between applications. This time savings helps you boost agent productivity, reduce handle time and lower your per-interaction costs.

Connect with experts anywhere in your organization

You spend a lot of time and money training your agents to handle every interaction that comes their way. But sometimes, a customer needs a unique account adjustment that requires a back-end system access, or they have a unique technical problem that requires specialized expertise.

To support these types of super-specific requests or tricky technical issues, your agents may need to engage a subject matter expert (SME).

The problem is that these SMEs are usually in a different department that isn’t connected to your contact center in any way. So, what usually happens is that the agent will email the SME, wait for a reply (which can take hours or days), then contact the customer with the SME’s response, and then hope the customer doesn’t have any follow-up questions that would start the whole cycle over again.

This approach quickly become a lengthy and time-consuming endeavor that can leave your customer frustrated with delays in getting their issue resolved and your agents spending a lot of their time managing follow-up interactions.

Even if the agent calls the SME, similar issues arise. The agent needs to put the customer on hold while they toggle to the company phone system to call the SME, who may or may not be available. The agent then needs to bounce back and forth to manage the two separate calls, acting as the go-between in the conversation, significantly extending the length of the interaction.

But by integrating your Microsoft Teams application with your contact center platform, your agents can connect with SMEs in real-time for higher productivity, faster responses, and fewer follow-ups.

With our pre-built integration, Teams contacts are automatically synchronized on the agent’s directory and their presence is displayed.

This unified directory enables agents to:

• Quickly find SMEs anywhere in your organization
• Easily see the SME’s availability using the Teams presence information which appears next to the contact’s name
• Click to call or email Teams users from within the directory for frictionless collaboration

This immediate access to SMEs enables company-wide collaboration so you can get customers answers to their issues without delay.

Increase your First Contact Resolution (FCR)

FCR measures the percentage of customer interactions that are resolved on the first try. This key metric gives you an indication of how efficiently your contact center is operating. It can also influence your customer satisfaction because customers are typically happier when their issue is resolved on the first try.

While the ideal situation is for the agent to resolve every customer issue on the first interaction, customers sometimes have extra challenging issues or super-specific questions that require an SME. When that happens, your FCR doesn’t have to be negatively impacted.

As explained above, if your agents have to email a SME for help, that approach will likely require a minimum of one follow-up interaction with the customer. And if every interaction that requires a SME requires a follow-up, there goes your FCR!

Integrating Teams into your contact center empowers your agents to easily connect with the SME during that first customer interaction. Agents can put the customer on hold while they obtain the appropriate guidance or conference in the SME if needed. Or they can use the Teams chat shortcut to collaborate in real-time. This immediate access to SMEs increases the likelihood that you will be able to resolve the customer’s issue during that first contact, eliminating follow-ups and boosting your customer satisfaction.

Extend the value of your Microsoft Teams to your contact center today!

Your organization is already experiencing the benefits Microsoft Teams delivers to your employees by enabling faster, easier collaboration across your company.

So why not extend that value to your contact center to increase the return on your Teams investment?

With CXone for Microsoft Teams, our pre-built integration helps you boost agent productivity, improve your KPIs, and make your customers happier. In addition to the benefit provided through our embedded agent and directory sync, we also provide global, carrier-grade voice services that reduce dropped and abandoned calls, safeguarding every interaction for a better customer experience.

Learn how you can use NiCE CXone for Microsoft Teams in your contact center to give your agents quick and easy access to the people, tools and information they to resolve customer issues quickly, efficiently and on the first interaction.