Automated Transcript
But again, we are indeed good to be back, as always. So, yeah, we’ve got another round of Microsoft Teams updates. We had Enterprise Connect 24 drop last month, so really big stuff this time around. So I’m going to talk us through some of the things that we’ve pulled out that we think are most important or most flashy.
I’d say probably more exciting to talk about. And there’s no better place to start off with than the queues application. For those of you who don’t know, the Teams queues application is a native way of embedding customer-facing interactions into the Teams client. It’s no overlays, there’s no pop-outs. This is Teams telephony as it was meant to be delivered.
And it’s just enhancing upon the existing voice capability that was in Teams. But surfacing in a way that’s going to be much more case-driven, voice-only. But, if you are really, really on top of how your team interacts with customers, there’s a lot of good stuff in here. So obviously, you get a dedicated view for your call queues.
So you can see of my agents who are in the queue, who’s not, who’s on a call, who’s waiting, you get all that visibility of reporting available to you within the Teams client. And you can see, you know, what queues of mine are performing well, and maybe you know which ones need a little bit of work.
And in that scenario, you’ve actually got the ability to listen into those calls live. So you can actually monitor your agents and, if they need a bit of assistance, you’ve got the ability to do that too. What does this mean for Teams? It means a whole lot. And I think you’ve hit the nail on the head in terms of how the functionality works, and to keep it really simple.
And just to recap it, the way that I see it is within the Teams admin center itself. You have all of these separate points i.e your queues, your auto attendants, your reporting and analytics, and then on the Teams client side, you’ve got your calls. What this app is looking to do from my eyes is to take all of those places, all of those features from one, the management side of it, and to the actual calling.
Call functionality parts and bring them all together in one single app. So you’re not constantly going between the two systems itself. Now, why is this good exactly? Like you say, to improve customer experience. That is the end goal of this whole thing. So bringing together all of that means that, well, one, the management is far more seamless.
It’s all done within a single app with the real-time reports. And also, as we said, reports, you can make those changes on the fly rather than potentially going into a separate app, i.e. the Teams admin center, having a look at the reports, not actually getting true real-time reports and making decisions based on that. You can be far more proactive and make the alterations on the fly.
And along with that, you’ve got the, the badge, the whisper, etc. so you can also coach people to do better at their job. And ultimately, as I say, it’s bringing it all full circle, improving the customer experience. So what does it mean for Teams? It means a whole lot. For one, contact center is a huge thing, especially if you’re looking at telephony in Teams specifically.
However, the big drawback from them, as amazing as they are, feature-rich as they are, they are expensive. All in all, if you are a business that has some sort of contact center functionality requirement, however, you don’t need all the bells and whistles. You don’t need the emails, the omni-channel, for example, or certain features such as skill-based routing, the calls app or the queues app.
Sorry, I should say is a great tool to actually use in order to sort of have that contact center functionality. The core of it anyway, without the sort of massive price tag. Yeah. And you know, you’ve made a really good point there because the queues application, it’s not going to be available for every single Teams user.
There are some prerequisites for doing such. So yes, it can handle both PSTN queues as well as VoIP queues, but there are some predetermined requirements for users who are going to leverage this. So one being you need to be enabled for Teams for that that’s very much part of what we do as Gamma. But on top of that, we do have the Teams premium license.
We’re seeing this is going to be rolled out in summer 2024, but it is going to be behind that Teams premium license. Yeah. Do you think this just means that if you cannot leverage Teams to its maximum potential, things like the premium license, things like Copilot, are they just going to be prerequisites for fully embracing what Microsoft Teams is as an application?
Definitely. I think we touched on this the last session of Gamma Box as well. I think the Teams premium license. Exactly that. You say if you are looking to absolutely leverage the maximum number of features and pieces of functionality that Teams has to offer, the Teams premium license is absolutely essential to bolster that even further. Copilot the functionality.
Absolutely. Ultimately, all of these things are going to make life a lot easier. And if it’s something you’re invested in anyway, I mean, Microsoft has been around for God knows how long, and there’s obviously some sort of investment in that from a lot of different angles. If you are already invested in that ecosystem and infrastructure, if you already, or fair with the actual solutions that they provide, the products they have, you’ve got Teams already and you’re using the functionality pretty much to its max as you can with the level you’re at to upgrade it, to get that additional, and these extra features that will ultimately make the customer experience better, user experience better,
etc. I don’t know why you would, to be honest.
Very good points. And, the last thing I’m going to touch on, on the user, I’m going to put you on the spot here. But people want to know, Tom, does this make Microsoft Teams the contact center? That’s a really difficult question. Answer. Yes or no, it depends on what you’re looking for from the contact center.
If you’re looking for features where but ultimately, what is a contact center for the contact center is for, external customer communication, potentially even some internal as well for external customer communications where they can come and interact with your business in order for them to achieve what they want and make it, have it done in the most seamless way possible, does the queues app make Teams a contact center?
It depends. I would say yes, purely because you are improving that customer experience.
It is ultimately where they are coming to contact you. Although yes, you don’t have all the features of functionality such as the omni-channel, etc. So for my money, yes, I’d say it does, albeit minimally. Good answer. And to counter that point, I think it’s not.
So you know, very important, very hot topics today. Does that make Microsoft Teams a contact center? For me? No, I think it makes it, steroid-injected with, six-filled phone system. Yeah, absolutely. But I think, CX is very much going to be driving around omni-channel how you want to interact with a business of your choice, whether that’s B2B or B2C. As it is with Microsoft Teams, as an, as a phone system and an application including the queues app, you don’t have that choice.
And that’s the big differentiator for me and CX is it’s customer choice and how you interact. And right now that is still locked down with voice. So for me, not a contact center, that doesn’t mean it’s not a massive leap forward in terms of what it can offer. Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I do that. That’s why I said it was a difficult one to answer.
I am technically still on the fence, but I allowed to disagree. I went to the USA just to have a valid argument for it. But no. Yeah, I do agree with every point. You said if you want the absolute max customer experience and you’d need a full-blown contact center with all the bells and whistles. However, if you are just looking to have a contact satellite, many contact center.
The queues app is certainly a good start even in the interim. Before you go whole hog into a full-blown contact center and make that investment. Good stuff. The next point that we pulled out from Enterprise Connect was going to be around real quality of experience for an end user who might be in a multi-participant meeting, where, you know, you’re in a diverse business where some people might be in an office space, some people might be traveling, some people might be from home, and everybody’s going to have to deal with the voice quality in a slightly different way. Voice isolation is quite an impressive thing. As a concept, I’ll be really excited to see how this works in practice, but, in a nutshell, Teams is going to be able to cater for the environment that you’re in. So we’ve seen this on the device side to an extent, white noise filtering.
But what we can do now is essentially isolate whoever is talking, be they in a busy office or potentially, on the road or, you know, on the tube at a coffee shop, that kind of thing. And we can take out all that noise. That’s going to be really distracting for anybody else in a meeting. And just focus in on what is going to be, what’s going to be available to, you know, and what’s gonna be valuable to the people on the other end of the phone.
Yep. Tell me a bit more about it. So, yeah, good description of it, but essentially voice isolation. What it does is the technology itself recognizes what’s called a voice profile. And from that, it uses it to transmit across the call that you’re on, only your voice that is, it is recognized and is associated with that voice profile, as you say, completely.
It cuts out background noise or voices it doesn’t recognize. All powered by which is incredible. I can’t believe this is where we’re at now.
So opted into this feature is actually really simple. And it’s essentially a quick and secure onboarding process to actually get you on that process. Literally consists of reading a single paragraph in your language of choice. The actual feature supports up to 25, and from there it recognizes your voice from within that paragraph that you’ve read creates your voice profile around it.
And from there, that is how the feature will kick in. It will recognize the words you’re saying, your tone of voice, etc. based on that paragraph and everything around you, including background noise and other people’s voices, as we’ve discussed already. So it’s not as simple as just, you know, applying a blurred background. You know, it’s not, it’s not a simple slide.
This is something that’s actually tailored to users. And that’s going to be able to actually improve the end result, right? Definitely, definitely. I think that’s the thing you could have some sort of noise suppression that you would on a headset where you do just flick a button or a low background filter where you’ve got the flick of a button.
However, it only works so far to a certain extent with this, it tailors it exactly like you say it to a specific user, and with the sort of clever technology that is AI does pick up a specific user’s voice. And that means that if you are on the go, if you’re pulling out your laptop in a train station, for example, your headphones, your headsets dead, the microphone, whatever you’re using to actually speak to someone can pick up that voice profile.
And like I say, the AI will kick in and filter every other noise other than your voice. So it is a really good point. And how annoying is it, right? When you’re in the office, you need to take a call, but you realize that I’ve chosen some of the set work. But when I actually need to make a call, I need to get up and leave that desk because there’s other people doing the exact same thing.
We’re all just interrupting each other. Pretty much. Yeah, exactly. It’s almost like what happened during the pandemic where everyone was at home and those working from home would have the kids or the dog or whoever in the background shouting and screaming, do whatever. It’s almost we’ve come out of that period of time and almost back into the same scenario where you are in an environment now where everyone’s back to work, everyone’s traveling, everybody’s back in the office, and those sort of distractions that were in the home during that time that we didn’t have anything to counter it.
They were always there, but now we’re out of a deal with them again. And now there is a proactive approach to actually deal with that. And, and like you say, make the user experience much better. I’m hoping this is going to remove me from some embarrassing situations right where potentially you are, and I need to join the same call.
You and I might be in an office like we are today, but we’re joining some remote participants or potentially even customers, right? And we physically need to separate ourselves for the neighbours where we cannot be sat next to each other. Otherwise, the experience for everybody else in the call, including each other, is going to be absolutely terrible. And we have seen that teams have started to address this as well.
But yeah, I think this is going to make some big leaps in that field too. I agree, I agree.
Next up, we’ve looked at this a little bit with the Copilot licensing as well, but we’ve seen some additional functionality being added to it. But it’s an intelligent recap on calls.
So what we’re now saying is that you can do intelligent recap on meetings, on PSTN calls, and on meetings as well on the mobile application. And it feels like the quantity of meetings that users have got being added to it, it’s only ever increasing. And how much are you working day? Do you think it’s going to be taken up by understanding what was said on that call?
What were the follow-on actions and what applies to me? And even just having, you know, we can, we can have a scribe. That’s a thing of the past, right? Having a scribe in meetings. So on to write down the tasks that you are talking about. But now we’ve got that, you know, transcript can be deployed. And then even if it is a two-hour-long workshop, right, you probably then need to give it to someone to review and pull out those actions.
How much time and effort and salary are we spending on that kind of thing, when we could leverage something like Copilot to actually go away, do that for us in not hours, not minutes, seconds? And then everybody’s got the same set of notes from a call. And they all know the clear actions to take away. Yeah, that’s the thing.
It alleviates, takes away that sort of human error aspect of it, obviously. But AI itself is an amazing thing. But we ultimately don’t want it. We don’t want it to take it away from that, from someone’s day-to-day living ultimately. But with utilizing something like it for something like this, where it can be done in seconds when we’re all on calls, what feels like 24/7, where from 9 to 5, back to back to back to back to back.
Something like this just completely takes away the stress of trying to work out right? What were the actions from that? What do I need to do? I’ve forgotten anything or I’ve been chased for this two weeks. I’ve been chased for this. I had the call two weeks ago. I’ve forgotten everything that we spoke about in the meeting.
I forgot even had an action because I’ve had so much to do. It takes away all of that. And like I say, the human error side of it as well and just makes it a lot more comfortable that actually sort of use having that sort of safety net of. Right, okay. We’ve had this technology in the background that has brought together what the meeting notes and what is expected of me and other people, and a really clear idea of, right, this is what I need to do.
So, you know, it’s out of sight, out of mind after that and can be actioned, the call.
Next one up on the list that we had is the discover feed in channels. So I have an embarrassing secret about this one. Right. Please. Discussing that earlier, I looked at this update and I thought, that looks really, really, really useful and I can’t wait for it to be deployed onto my Teams application.
And what happened after that? And I realized I’ve had it for ages. So yes, it’s a very subtle change, which is good. We like subtle. We don’t want big change, but sometimes it can be so subtle that you might not notice it. So I didn’t notice this one. And what the discover feed in channels is, is that rather than having to scroll through all of your teams and all of your channels to pick up updates that people are putting in, whether you’re tagged or whether you’re not, this is making things so much more simple.
It actually it turns it into a bit like what you’d see on social media. Right? It’s the news feed. It’s a news feed for everything that’s happening in all the channels that you’re in, in a sequential order. So if you need to see from Monday what has happened, what has happened in my business across these channels, what updates have been posted, who’s doing what?
Have we had any great successes that we want to share? Are there any important updates that I might be missing? Because I’m very busy. I’ve been out at the office. You can catch that up in a really succinct way. And that’s a big game changer for me. The ability to digest this information in a quicker and more effective way.
I think that’s really powerful to end users.
Definitely. And, it’s like you said, it’s turning it into a news feed that’s easy to digest. I mean, I don’t know about you, but, obviously the adoption of Teams happened for us happened a number of years ago. Now, because of that, that left-hand side bar is just chock full of different teams that we’re part of it.
Maybe needs a bit of admin offsite to go through and remove stuff that we don’t need. But ultimately there’s a lot of teams in there that do get added to quite frequently. So having that so exactly ease of use and quality of life change where it is just this is everything that’s happened between X and Y. That’s perfect.
That means that you’re not missing anything. Obviously, it’s far easier to read and you’re not having to trawl through all of the actual teams themselves to find it. It saves just a lot of time and a lot of hassle. Doesn’t it? And the last point that we have for today, of course, we come back to Teams phone.
We love Teams phone. We do indeed. And there’s a nice little quality of life update in the session list. But there are some additional call routing settings, specifically separating your internal and your external calling. So depending on how you view a job role, you might treat calls from outside of your business to calls from colleagues, or anybody really within your organization separately, you can now set different preferences for forwarding calls that come from the PSTN.
So if you’re in a customer-faced role, make sure that you know, you get those calls. You could forward to a mobile, you could forward to a team member. If you’re out of office and you look after them as a priority. But maybe, you know, in certain scenarios, those calls from within the business, maybe they can wait, depending on what you’re doing on that day.
And now we’ve got that flexibility.
Absolutely. So the, I’m very guilty of this where any sort of call coming in internal or external, whether I’m waiting for a call or not, I will always answer whatever comes in. And if that then means that said call that I’m waiting on does come in. In the meantime, I find it so difficult to actually cut the call that I’m on short and say, all right, I’m really sorry, I’ve got to go.
Whatever it may be, having this where you can if you, for example, are on the move like we often are, to be able to say, right, that anything internal forwarded to voicemail just know I could deal with it when I move about. And anything external, especially if I’m waiting for something, can be put directly through to say, a mobile.
If the worst came to the worst. For some reason I was on a train and there was no signal. Internet connection that may be bad, no phone signal. It just gives you that, for me anyway, it gives you that kind of prioritize the sort of key tasks that you’ve got and not discount the people internally, but at least put them to the side just now while you’re waiting on the more important tasks coming in.
Yeah, we like our colleagues. We’ll get back to them. We’re not abandoning anybody. It says if it’s a customer-focused rule, let’s put the customers first.
Well, that’s everything that we have to talk about. And what a month that was. Really enjoyable to see such good functionality coming out. And, yeah, definitely looking forward to getting our hands on it. Right. I mean, I like to test this kind of stuff. For sure. Yeah, lots of exciting stuff. And, yeah, we’ll see what comes out next month.
Yeah. Like I say, that was everything we had for this month. Thank you very much for joining us. We will be back. So please keep tuned in and we’ll see you soon.
