How to integrate your call center software with Microsoft Teams

Where do you start, if you want to know how to integrate your company’s call center software with Microsoft Teams?

In the video below, Mike Smith explains the two different types of teams integration, and then details several questions you need to ask, in order to narrow the field of call center software solutions, that can “integrate” with teams.

Want Mike’s recommendations on the best cloud call center software vendors, that your company should be quoting? He’d love to help. Click the button below and ask him today.

About Mike

Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

Your company is looking to replace your call center solution. Maybe you’re replacing your phone system and your call center at the same time, or maybe it’s just the call center. But one question that came up is, “Hey, your company’s starting to use Teams quite a bit, and you want to know which cloud contact center or call center solutions integrate with Microsoft Teams.”

It’s a great question. Obviously, since this pandemic, especially Teams is something that a lot of companies have started to use and a lot of companies have call centers out there. So you want to know hey, how do we integrate this call center with Teams?

There might be a number of reasons why you’re wanting to do that. Maybe you’re wanting to use Teams phone system for your normal phone system functions, or maybe your company just is living within Teams so much and collaborating internally that you want the call center to also integrate with Teams.

Great question and I wanted to make a video on it in terms of how to kind of guide you through your thinking of what type of integration you’re looking for and know some stuff up front so that when you go to shop for companies, you know what you’re asking for right away.

Just ask for recommendations

So before I get too deep into the topic, just a quick plug, if you want to know which vendors your company should be quoting, which call center vendors your company should be quoting that integrate with Teams, don’t Google it. Don’t try to watch a million videos like mine and try to guess. Instead, just contact me on email or by phone (714.593.0011). I’m a broker for all the major cloud contact center service providers and within a few questions, I can tell you the best companies that you should be quoting. So more information on that at the end of the video. Also, if you like the video, don’t forget to hit the like button down below and subscribe to the channel.

Which Type of Integration?

The first question that you want to ask yourself about your organization’s call center needs, if you want your call center software to integrate with Teams, is what type of integration do you really want? There’s two main types that I would say of integration with Teams. Number one is you just want the ability for one of your users to be within Teams and make an outbound call. Meaning they want to click to dial a certain number within a contact that they have that they’re seeing in Teams and make an outbound call. Maybe you have a call center where you’re making a lot of outbound calls and those contacts are within Teams. Maybe you have a CRM that’s integrated with Teams, and you want to be able to click to dial to outbound call. You don’t necessarily have to use Teams as your interface all the time, but you just want outbound call through Teams. Well, that’s what I would call an integration, not necessarily using Teams phone system. That’s the first category.

The second category I would say is you want to be able to use Teams as your only interface for your call center agents. You want your call center agents to live within Teams. Maybe using Teams phone system for your whole organization and then you have your call center also on Teams phone system with the additional call center features. That’s the first question. Decide which of those best fits your organization’s call center needs.

Call Queue or Ring/Hunt Groups?

The second thing you want to think about when it comes to integrating your call center software with Microsoft Teams is the features that you’re going to need with your call center. That will really determine what type of Teams product that you can have with the call center product that you’re looking for.

To kick it off, the first feature you want to think about is, do we really need a call center or do we just have ring groups? What that is I talk to a lot of companies on a daily basis and a lot of times companies will say, “Hey, we have a call center.” They’ll say, “Well, when a call comes in to this one number, it rings 10 phones simultaneously within our organization and the first person who picks it up takes the call.” Well, that’s not really a call queue. They’ll say that, “Hey, we have a call queue and that’s what it does.” Well, that’s not technically what I would term a call queue. That’s what I would term a ring group or a hunt group. That’s different than a call queue.

I know within Microsoft Teams, they call some things call queues and they’re really ring groups and stuff like that. It gets pretty confusing, but the way I would term that is the difference between a true call queue and a ring group is a call queue is when the caller is sitting on hold while your phone system is finding someone available to answer the call, and it’s finding one person. Then once that one person can answer the call, the call is connected and the person stops hearing the hold music and they start talking to the person. That’s what I would call a true call queue.

What’s a Ring Group?

A ring group is more where a person calls in and they just hear ringing while the phone system is either ringing a ton of phones at once or it’s ringing a group of people sequentially. It’s ringing one person maybe four times, and then it rings another person four times, but the person’s not hearing hold music. They’re just hearing ringing. It might ring, ring, ring for a long period of time while it’s finding different people.

The difference between this also with a true call queue, where you have people in queue and somebody sitting on hold waiting for somebody to be answered, you can also pull things like reports on how long people are sitting in queue live. What’s our call queue hold time right now? You can see those metrics and you can say, okay, we don’t want to have anyone waiting in queue for more than 30 seconds. If that’s the case, I want you to ring these other folks at the same time and try to get somebody to pick up. Where as a ring group or a hunt group, you don’t have that option.

All right. So that’s some stuff to think about right away, is do we have just a ring group or do we really need a call queue that’s a true call center?

Calls or Omni-Channel?

All right. So building off of that, next thing you want to think of is if you have a call center and you really need a call queue, do you only need phone calls or do you need a bunch of other forms of communication? Do you want to have text messages thrown into the queue where you can see how long it’s taking your company to respond to a text message, or an email, or a website chat request on your website? Those are all things now that you can add to the call queue and you can manage. You could manage the wait times and the responses that are coming back and things like that. So does your company need only calls or do they want to add additional things into the queue? That’s what you would call omnichannel. Omnichannel queuing. Do you need email, or text messages, or website chat, or social media, things like that added to the call queue?

Call Recording

Okay. Another feature you want to think about is call recording. Do you want to record calls? Is that really important to your organization? Do you want to be able to record all calls all the time? Or do you want to be able to record on demand? That will really help you determine some things.

WFM

Another one might be workforce management. Do you want to be able to have software with your call center that helps you determine shifts. Shifts of call center agents, be able to determine times of days that you’re typically more busy and help you predict your staffing so that you staff more people during certain times of day and your call center software is able to help you with that because it can see the patterns that are taking place with calls.

Reporting

Something else that I mentioned earlier is reporting. What types of reports do you need? Do you need real time reports from the call queue? Or do you just need historical call reporting? That’s a big question to ask.

AI

Another thing you want to ask about features, ask yourself internally is do we want some AI that can pick up on things like customer sentiment? So if you have a manager of your call center right now, how are they managing, looking or listening to the call recordings every once in a while? A lot of times you’ll hear a call center person say, “Hey, we have a manager that every once in a while picks out some calls at random and listens to the calls to make sure that they’re managing the call center agents and know what they’re saying on the phone.” Well, that’s a very inefficient way to manage your call center agents.

Instead, nowadays, they have things, with AI they can measure customer sentiment so they can listen in, your call center software can automatically listen in and detect if someone’s happy, or really mad, or using a competitor’s name, or trigger words like pricing is too high, things like that. They can take snippets of the calls and automatically send that to a call center manager so they can only have to listen to important recordings instead of trying to find a needle in a haystack. So is that something that’s interesting to you?

PCI, HIPAA or Other Compliance?

Then lastly, another feature is, do you need your call center agents to take credit card information? Do they need to enter a secure portal to get the credit card information of a customer and they need to be PCI compliant? With that, do you need any other compliance? Do you need to be GDR compliant? Do you need to be HIPAA compliant? Things like that.

Why are these questions important?

So those are all feature questions that you need to ask yourself about your call center if you want to integrate it with Teams. The reason being is because some companies can integrate with Teams and then some Teams integrations with call centers cannot do some of those thing. And you have to use a separate call center software solution.

Even though you want to integrate your call center software with Teams, it’s not going to be able to because you want some of those other features and Teams just isn’t there yet sometimes with some of those features.

Reach out!

So I hope this video was helpful. If so, don’t forget to hit the like and subscribe down below. Hey, if you want my recommendation on the best vendors to quote for your company’s call center software, don’t start Googling it and trying to find a million videos out there like mine. It’s great to watch the videos and educate yourself a little bit, but there are literally dozens, if not hundreds of options out there and your chances of ending up with the wrong vendors are really high if you don’t ask somebody who knows what they’re doing. Send me an email or give me a call (714.593.0011)

I’ve been doing this for 18 years. I know all the service providers out there that you should be quoting, and within a few questions, I can tell you which ones to quote, introduce you to the right people at those organizations and oversee the quoting process. The nice thing is I don’t charge you anything for doing it. The vendors, the call center software vendors, actually pay me my broker fee. So you don’t have to pay me at all. So there’s no excuse not to at least reach out and ask me for my opinions. All right. So again, don’t forget to hit the like and subscribe button down below, and I will catch you on the next one.