As we’ve discussed prior, Microsoft Teams is leading the industry as a cloud collaboration platform that integrates the people, content and tools teams need to communicate successfully. While it enables great collaboration, MS Teams is delivered in a complex maze of endpoints, network modalities and user scenarios, which has caused complications for enterprise contact center teams.

For those looking to migrate to MS Teams, there are several questions to ask beforehand to make the transition as seamless as possible. In this article, we highlight those key questions, and review how Nectar can help with the implementation and management of Teams.

Why Migrate to Microsoft Teams?

Microsoft Teams extends the capabilities of Skype for Business, which will be discontinued on July 31, 2021. It does so by bringing together chat, video meetings, voice calling, file storage and app integrations under a single interface.

As a central hub for team collaboration, Teams helps streamline how users get work done. This ultimately improves user experience, customer satisfaction and business outcomes. Teams is constantly improving its capabilities to better enable enterprise teams to communicate more effectively and break down traditional barriers.

Have You Tried Other Solutions in the Past?

It’s important that your cloud collaboration tool offers solutions that scale, keep information safe and ensure compliance.

If your customer service, IT or contact center team used one of these platforms in the past, it’s important to look at what went right and what went wrong before migrating to Microsoft Teams. Maybe the other ones you tried didn’t integrate or scale well enough and created additional headaches in security and compliance.

Or perhaps you were piecing together several tools and integrations because you couldn’t find one all-in-one solution to fit your enterprise needs. In the long-term, this may have cost you more time and resources rather than helping. With that in mind, Teams developed an all-inclusive solution.

Who Will Assist with Onboarding & Deployment?

When deploying Teams, it’s recommended you do so strategically in stages in order to implement best practices and adoption.

Microsoft Teams offers a 24/7 Operations team to help support your needs, along with monitoring and management services to help measure data, capacity and utilization.

It’s recommended that enterprise executives assemble a dedicated group of internal individuals who will be using Teams, including general staff, IT, marketing personnel, managers, salespeople and other key stakeholders to assist with the transition. These people will serve as a sounding board for their departments as far as their questions and needs to help with decision making and productivity.

Large companies must plan their MS Teams migration with care and thought when it comes to technical and human components.

How Big is Your Team & Where Are They?

Large businesses and companies can benefit most from migrating to Microsoft Teams. The platform is cloud-based, so employees can stay connective and be more productive on the move.

Teams supports global growth and collaboration across multiple locations and time zones, so if you have staff in different locations, they all have access to the same information and resources.

Are you Looking to Streamline Enterprise Team Operations?

One of the main reasons enterprises seek a solution like Teams is they want to streamline their operations, enable remote work environments and innovate more effectively in competitive marketplaces.

A Forrester Report states that firstline workers save 45 minutes per week by collaborating with colleagues, and 4 hours a week are saved by information workers through improved collaboration and information sharing.

Microsoft Teams has been proven to help in several areas, including:

• More effective & efficient meetings
• Reduced unnecessary meetings
• Application switching time savings
• Reduced employee turnover & onboarding costs
• Reduced communication & collaboration solution costs
• Firstline worker collaboration time savings
• Faster time-to-decision
• Replace overnight trips with online meetings

Do You Want to Improve User & Customer Experience?

A survey of 260 organizations showed that the top three business objectives for migrating to Teams were the same, regardless of company size.

The reasons were to increase employee productivity, improve the ability to collaborate across the organization and enable innovation. Those looking to improve experiences for both their users and customers should consider Microsoft Teams as a viable solution.

What Are the Costs?

There will be several costs associated with Microsoft Teams Migration. The first will be internal effort and implementation expenses.

Microsoft also offers professional deployment and migration professional services, but those will come with a price tag as well and vary based on the size of the company. An additional cost that can add up is allocated Microsoft 365 Licenses.

That all being said, Teams will also help your enterprise save money in the long term. The Forrester report referenced above reports payback in less than six months. The numbers associated with these savings can be referenced in the report.

How Will You Measure Effectiveness of Teams Implementation?

It’s important to measure how Teams is being used in order to get the most out of it.

Teams offers several tools that help improve operations, including the Teams Admin Center, Call Quality Dashboard and Power BI templates.

While each of these tools play an important role, they are disconnected, so they require multiple logins and time-consuming, manual correlation. Enterprises can benefit from a streamlined all-in-one monitoring process, which is what Nectar can provide.

How Nectar Can Make Teams Better

Our approach unifies the value of the three native Microsoft tools in one interface. This enables a top-down approach to identifying issues in the context of user experience across your entire environment.

Nectar allows you to identify the problem immediately and have it solved before you’ve even finished logging into the various Microsoft tools.

If you’d like to learn more about how Nectar can help monitor UC, voice and video quality and network health with Microsoft Teams, let us know.