INTERVIEW 98 Seamless communication Paul Mason explains how Solgari Contact Centre for Microsoft Teams allows organisations to respond to their customers flexibly and effectively through one unified platform BY ALEX SMITH People have become used to communicating instantly across a range of different platforms, whether its social media, email, SMS, live chat or voice. They expect organisations to be just as flexible in their communications, answering their questions and concerns via any channel using knowledge from any previous discussions they might have had. “Customers expect communication to be relevant to them and their interests and contextualised by their prior history with that organisation – and they expect it to be secure,” says Paul Mason, global Microsoft alliance lead at Solgari. “Ultimately, they expect a joined-up interaction across any channel. This requires businesses to have a similarly joined-up, holistic view into all interaction data across all their communication channels. This is still challenging many businesses, which often have multiple fragmented communication systems and data stored across different silos.” One of the platforms that businesses themselves will be using most frequently to communicate is Microsoft Teams. There are now more than 300 million Teams users around the world following the boom in remote and hybrid working during the pandemic. Solgari therefore saw an opportunity to bring its allchannel business communication solution to a new and valuable platform that its customers were already using. “Teams is clearly a trusted leader in unified communications,” says Mason. “More and more users want Teams as their primary communication and collaboration workspace, allowing them to simply access other line-of-business applications while remaining in their Teams environment.” Solgari wanted to make sure that any integration was more than a superficial one. Instead of simply using the Teams platform as an initial stepping stone to another service, the company investigated how it could make best use of Teams’ capabilities. This led it to develop Solgari Contact Centre for Microsoft Teams, one of the few contact-centres-as-a-service solutions to be integrated to the deepest level available; the Extend model. The Extend model uses the Graph API that Microsoft created for third-party providers to integrate their solutions with Teams calls. In the Extend model, calls are not transferred out from Teams like in the Connect model. Instead, calls are kept inside of Teams, and calls can come into Teams and the Solgari Contact Centre with any connection like Calling Plans, Direct Routing and Operator Connect. “The Extend model provides users with the significant benefits of remaining natively within their preferred Teams environment, including Single Sign On, Agent Presence and seamless interaction with all other Microsoft “ The customer received a seamless, single continuous experience across multiple channels, multiple people, and artificial intelligence”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=