March 2020 brought about an unprecedented global situation both personally and professionally, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses to abandon their offices in favour of their homes. Without innovative collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams keeping us connected, the transition to remote working would have been nearly impossible. However, the success of this transition is exemplified by the fact that even as the pandemic begins to ease, many businesses are continuing to operate using a remote or hybrid working model.
As more employees demonstrate their desire to continue working remotely in some capacity, in order to retain their key players, all businesses must understand how to integrate additional, mission-critical capabilities such as contact center as a service, into their Microsoft Teams estate, to enable teams to deliver value to customers from anywhere and compliantly access the tools they need to perform as part of this hybrid model.
Fortunately, Solgari for Microsoft Teams offers a simple solution, boasting a variety of features, capabilities and benefits that make remote working not just possible but effective.
The features of remote working with Microsoft Teams
Document collaboration and file sharing
Microsoft Teams provides a single, seamless environment in which to store and share crucial documents and files. Whether you are working in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, users can easily share and collaborate on documents in real time, even when a customer or colleague is on the line. As Microsoft Teams syncs updates automatically, you don’t need to worry about version control or over-writing another user’s work. With effective collaboration at your fingertips and the business communication capabilty of Solgari working in perfect harmony, remote working with Microsoft Teams has never been easier.
Instant messaging
If your team are not physically together in the office, then they need to find an equally fast way to communicate. Not every request, query or check requires an email; in fact, many businesses are finding internal email increasingly inefficient. Microsoft Teams allows colleagues to stay connected quickly and easily. Not only can you easily reach fellow employees, but you can check their availability at a glance via their statuses, so you can feel assured that you are not messaging at an inappropriate or inconvenient time. From a contact centre perspective, that Presence detail can integrate with call status, queues, and wrap-up time – so that colleagues get one, accurate way of knowing whether you’re available for a call or chat, or not as the case may be.
Video calling
Perhaps the most obvious advantage of remote working with Microsoft Teams is the ability to host meetings and conferences via video call. According to your specific preferences, you can set the meeting to either only audio or video. There are also a range of features that make holding meetings online easier and more productive. For instance, the speaker can share their screen to make content more accessible to everyone involved, the meeting can be recorded and made available on demand to anyone, and participants can raise their hand (virtually) to ask questions without interrupting. These features help to make virtual meetings just as seamless as in-person ones.
Organisation and management
One of the greatest challenges of remote working is organising your team while working separately. Staying abreast of your colleagues’ engagements and commitments can be challenging without being able to ask them personally. Fortunately, remote working with Microsoft Teams is made easier by its impressive organisational capabilities. Teams integrates with your Outlook calendar, allowing you to not only maintain consistency across your Microsoft 365 suite, but also access the calendars of your colleagues too. Creating and inserting new meetings is simple once you have a clear understanding of everyone’s availability.
Furthermore, you can integrate Planner into Microsoft Teams, adding it as a tab in the General section for convenience. This tool allows you to create to-do lists, categorise tasks, set timelines, prioritise projects and assign them to members of your team. In short, Planner helps you to stay on top of your daily operations and track your progress more easily.
Within the contact centre function, Supervisors gain a single, unified view of call and agent data, across all channels – providing them with the tools and insight required to refine processes, manage call queues, identify communication bottlenecks, promote first call resolution, and increase efficiency throughout the contact centre estate.
Optimise Teams with Solgari
Solgari is an omnichannel Contact center as a service, delivering powerful, unified communications. Available as a native application within Microsoft Teams, Solgari helps to enhance and extend its remote working potential with voice, video, chat, SMS, WhatsApp and social media.
Want to discover how Solgari can enhance remote working with Microsoft Teams? Book a demo today to trial our innovative communication capabilities.
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