Successfully Integrating Microsoft Teams and Contact Center

Authors: Irwin Lazar, President and Principal Analyst

Not available for licensing.

Integrating Microsoft Teams into the contact center offers significant benefits, including the ability for customer service agents and back-office employees to seamlessly engage with one another using the same voice, video, and messaging platform.

Selecting the right contact center integration approach for Teams requires carefully determining requirements and evaluating competing solutions based on their ability to maximize reliability and performance, while minimizing complexity.

A Teams-certified contact center leveraging Microsoft Azure Communication Services provides seamless, off-the-shelf integration to third-party contact center platforms without requiring extensive customization. Additional benefits may come from consolidated management of dial plans, calling contracts, and call routing rules, and integration of additional services including recording and artificial intelligence (AI).

This issue paper provides guidance for IT and customer experience (CX) leaders to evaluate and select the optimal Teams-certified contact center solution for their company’s needs.

Table of Contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Contact Center and Unified Communications Are Converging
  • The Need to Support Internal Agents and Informal Contact Centers
  • Is Microsoft Teams Good Enough for the Contact Center?
  • Integrating Microsoft Teams and the Contact Center
  • Connect Model
  • Extend Model
  • Power Model (Upcoming)
  • Beyond Integration: Adding Essential Capabilities
  • Selecting the Right Teams-integrated Contact Center
  • Conclusions and Recommendations