By: Tony Martino

CSPs are looking to position themselves as essential partners, helping their customers of all sizes to transform the way they collaborate and communicate. To innovate beyond traditional voice solutions, providers can now deliver comprehensive tools that will enhance the Microsoft Teams experience.

Many enterprises currently lack confidence in the ability of Microsoft Teams to replace their existing telephony system. Although Teams is a powerful platform, its feature set and real-time data capabilities are still evolving.

Many CSPs are delivering a range of direct routing services that enable businesses to connect their existing telephony infrastructure with Teams Phone. This provides a cost-effective and flexible solution that ensures a smooth transition to Teams Phone while preserving the investment in existing telephony infrastructure.

Some CSPs opt to host and manage Session Border Controllers, which are essential for connecting traditional telephony systems (PSTN) with Teams. This ensures secure and reliable voice traffic between the enterprise's phone system and Teams. Other CSPs are providing SIP trunking services to facilitate the connection of on-premises PBX systems with Teams Phone, enabling businesses to leverage their existing telephony infrastructure while benefiting from Teams' unified communication features.

Maximizing Analytics Across Multiple Platforms

While the infrastructure is an important part of the solution, CSPs are also investing in managed services for Teams which incorporate deployment, integration, and support. A winning incentive is when Teams and Teams Phone services are bundled with high-speed internet and other value-added services that enable businesses to streamline their communication tools.

An important value-added service that will enhance every Teams installation is the latest software to monitor, analyze, and gain actionable insights into customer interactions and engagement. What makes the latest generation of analytics so powerful is that its capability is comparable across both Teams and traditional telecoms platforms. Consistent user experiences and statistical metrics make it easy to deploy, and since it requires little training, users can unlock further advantages from the existing technology.

From the outset, analytics can show if the transition of calls from a traditional phone system to Microsoft Teams Phone has been effective, ensuring any changes in technology does not cause a decline in customer experience.

Enhancing Customer Engagement

When an enterprise is looking to enhance their customer services, call analytics is often the first to be deployed. This delivers clear insights into the responsiveness of customer-facing teams, shedding light on factors such as promptness in answering calls, call flows, live call queues, unanswered calls, and most importantly, any missed calls that were not returned. Armed with this information, the organization can allocate appropriate resources to ensure every customer has a good experience.

Once an organization has adopted call analytics for quantitative analysis, adding recording into their operations is often the next step, delivering in-depth qualitative analysis of customer conversations. While some may adopt call recording for practical reasons such as compliance, risk management, training, and dispute resolution, it can also deliver unparalleled insight into customer experience.

For example, managers may use call analytics to identify call handlers that have paused and resumed the most call recordings, which would indicate that credit card payments have been taken. They can review the recordings of these successful interactions to assess customer sentiment, identify underlying factors, and devise strategies to replicate favorable outcomes. Understanding sentiment in a call