At a recent Microsoft Inspire™ event, the buzz around the Microsoft Teams™ collaboration platform was undeniable. The common theme of many of the presentations was facilitating online collaboration. Attendees seemed to agree that Teams is an excellent platform for that purpose.
Microsoft aims to integrate Teams with other Microsoft™ business apps and establish it as the center of its desktop and mobile workspaces. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella commented, “That’s why we’re building Microsoft Teams as an organizing layer for all the ways we work – the modes of communication, collaboration, and the ability to extend it with other apps and services. With Teams, we’re ensuring that people can collaborate inside and outside the organization, that they can learn in the context of their work, and that they can retain and build new social capital.”1
Digital transformation and integration
Microsoft’s vision is to provide a digitally transformed workplace that connects employees and departments. Teams integrates chat, phone calls, and video conferencing with business apps such as Microsoft Dynamics 365™ for full-featured collaboration.
Integrating communication and collaboration tools with Dynamics 365 can have some very exciting benefits for an organization’s teams. Consider these possibilities for team members who support customers:
- With Teams, users can communicate by phone or video call while having the customer’s record open in Dynamics 365. This feature enables users to easily reference past interactions, contacts, and data without having to switch applications.
- If a customer’s email address or other information needs to be updated, users can easily do so while still on the Teams call. The updated information will be available immediately throughout the organization.
- Users can take notes in Teams as needed during a customer service call and automatically save the notes in the permanent customer record in Dynamics 365.
- Teams users can set up workflow notifications so departments associated with the customer will be notified of changes to the account.
The benefits of Microsoft Teams
To test the viability of Teams, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study to examine the potential return on investment that organizations might realize after adopting Teams. Researchers interviewed four customers and surveyed 260 organizations using Teams.
Forrester’s April 2019 “Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Teams” report cited a number of notable benefits throughout organizations:
- Working with Teams reduced the number of meetings by nearly 19% and reduced meetings’ durations as well.
- By the third year, online meetings using Teams had replaced 150 overnight trips.
- Information workers saved four hours per week because of improved information sharing and collaboration.
- Decision-makers improved their time-to-decision by over 17%.
- 88% of survey respondents felt having all of their solutions in one place saved time.
- IT compliance and e-discovery costs decreased by as much as 13.2%.
