How has Unified Communication changed in 2020?
In 2020, Unified Communications has consistently changed and it made its largest strides especially due to the Covid-19 Pandemic: digital transformation has quickly impacted how people work, interact and communicate, and within the new work-from-anywhere paradigm the interest towards innovative UC solutions has increased accordingly. Enterprises all over the world have rapidly considered to adopt a cloud-based UC platform to boost all their communications and to enable remote work, enhancing at the same time the collaboration between staff members and the customer service quality. If it’s true that these new UC challenges and their rise in demand started in 2020 when the world emergency began, in 2021 they have started to become definite intentions, and CEOs and IT Managers are now actively scouting to identify the best solutions to handle efficiently all their professional communications, possibly with a single and effective solution. Streamline employees’ workflow from anywhere and meet current customer needs (e.g. fragmentation of interaction channels, resolve their issues immediately or in a very short time) are high drivers for strategic UC business plans.
Is Microsoft Teams the solution for enterprises to react to UC changes?
In the beginning, the transition to cloud communications was not so easy, as it was such a sudden change that both technologically and psychologically entrepreneurs were caught by surprise. “As Covid-19 impacts every aspect of our work and life, we have seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months” commented Satya Nadella after Q1, 2020. But cloud-based unified communications solutions have immediately proven to be effective in supporting business communications.
The enormous success Microsoft Teams had in the last 12 months (reaching 145 million daily active users) is due primarily to two key factors: first, Teams is a single centralized hub able to handle all business communications – including collaboration – and secondly Microsoft has such a long-standing presence worldwide, it leverage on its wide adoption to obtain a competitive advantage on competitors.
In addition to this, the available integrations with third-parties applications guarantee users to obtain almost all the features they need to be efficient at work. Optimize the workflow with colleagues (including instant chat, video conferencing, file sharing, and group creation), route incoming calls to specific departments or persons, put callers in a queue and so on has never been so easy: it just needs Internet Connections and a device to access the platform, all the rest is done by Teams and the third party applications the company chooses to activate.
Enterprises have quickly started to migrate their legacy communication system to Microsoft Teams to centralize voice and video interactions and live chats and to have also advanced call management features. However recent surveys show that most of the ones that haven’t done it yet, say they will do it in the upcoming months.
Leveraging Direct Routing, enterprises can easily take advantage of an efficient cloud-based contact center integrated with Teams.
Microsoft Teams contact center integration ensures companies the possibility to handle incoming and outgoing calls via Teams with advanced call features, such as sophisticated dispatching algorithms and flexible IVR, to increase customer satisfaction. With these extra features Microsoft Teams is definitely nominated to be a professional hub to manage internal communications and also all the interaction with customers.
Let’s summarize the most important plus of adopting Microsoft Teams as your communication hub:
- maximizes efficiency and productivity thanks to the easy-to-use and intuitive platform your staff is already familiar with
- centralizes the communications with colleagues and customers
- less operating costs and time-saving having all in one place
- streamlines work organization increasing collaboration
- you can customize your workplace according to your specific business needs, thanks to the third parties applications and their integrations (e.g. contact centre, Business Intelligence, CRM)
- you can provide your customers with a new and smooth experience.
