As of February this year, over 130,000 UK businesses used Microsoft Office 365 – or Microsoft 365 as it has now been rebranded – and as of April 30th, there were over 75 million daily users worldwide and while the numbers over the summer haven’t been shared yet, the widespread surge in Teams adoption shows no signs of slowing!

If you already use Microsoft Office as part of your operation, you’ve probably seen how Teams can bring all your separate workflows and condense them into one place. But just in case you haven’t, it’s worth covering Teams’ major selling points.

MICROSOFT TEAMS KEY FEATURES

• Businesses can use Teams to replace their telephone system, enabling staff to use their computers, tablets and mobiles to take calls even using their existing office numbers. Plus, with competitive call plans businesses can save a significant amount compared to a typical phone line.
• Teams acts as an instant messenger client across your business, helping you keep in touch with colleagues and clients without having to scroll through your inbox to find the latest email in the thread.
• You can use Teams to share files and projects, allowing for collaborative working between staff & clients alike.
• The application obviously works perfectly with the rest of Microsoft’s Office suite, but also has its own little app store, where you can download companion apps for various platforms, like Salesforce, Asana, Zendesk and Adobe. This enables Teams to integrate with the rest of your CRM and wider operational systems for far simpler workflows that increase productivity.

TEAMS AND DIRECT CALLING

We’ve already written blogs about how businesses should be looking to IP-based calling solution and how Teams’ key features can facilitate strong remote working, but Teams can reach far past IM and video calls.

By choosing MINT to implement their Teams deployment, businesses can choose to say goodbye to messy deskphones and leverage Teams as their complete telephony solution, helping to maximise productivity and enable employees to work from home just as efficiently as they would in the office.

Users can call from their computers, tablets and mobiles just like they would dial a number on a phone keypad with all the typical 01, 02, 03, 07 numbers catered for, without having to switch their attention, and leverage high-quality USB and wireless headsets for the best-possible audio quality.

Plus, our customers save 40% on average, on their Teams Direct Calling solution, compared to typical landline calling solutions because operations aren’t having to pay for separate line rental and calls for each handset they require, even if they are only used once in a blue moon!

In a recent implementation we designed for a national marketing agency, we understood that ensuring every call was answered was vital and therefore incorporated a business-wide hunt group to ensure that any phone call was answered in a timely manner.

We went even further with their integrations by adding ‘voicemail to email’ functionality, where any voicemails are saved as audio files and even transcribed so that employees can quickly scan the message, instead of having to listen to the whole recording.

If you’d like to find out more about how you can futureproof your telephony and better enable your team to work remotely, check out our recent Case Study with Blabbermouth Marketing!

API INTEGRATIONS AND TEAMS

The possibilities for integrating with Teams isn’t just limited to the 450 apps in the Teams ‘app store’ either. We have the technical knowledge and skills in the MINT team to write custom software, using Microsoft’s APIs to marry Teams into the tasks that you need. For example, incorporating Proof of Delivery data fields within teams that link directly to a CRM system to help optimise how your team deals with customer service issues.

In the modern age of Cloud-hosted platforms and Software as a Service, businesses can end up getting bogged down in the multitude of apps, each with its own login and password, that just act as frustrations rather than facilitators for your team.

Microsoft Teams can help bridge those separate apps and act as the central hub from which you can organise a massive portion – if not all – of your business’ operations. Productivity is paramount and if your business wants less hassle, logging in and out, searching for the right attachment, switching between phone and computer for calls, then Teams is the game-change that can deliver and we can help make that a reality. So, get in touch today and let’s find out how MINT and Teams can help your business be more productive.