Maximizing Customer Engagement with Microsoft Teams

Managing customers and reaching out to prospects are crucial aspects of running a small business. For many owners or operators, it’s common to respond directly to inbound customer calls or support inquiries while juggling day-to-day responsibilities. Being reachable is essential.

Microsoft Teams can help you with this by allowing you to meet, call, chat, share files, or collaborate with customers, partners, suppliers, and anyone else outside your company domain.

Microsoft was named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Unified Communications as a Service for the sixth year in a row. This recognition, we feel, recognizes Microsoft’s commitment to consistently deliver innovations in Microsoft Teams to help you succeed1.

Queues App for Microsoft Teams is Now Generally Available

Teams supports custom apps and bots that can automate tasks and enhance collaboration. These can be integrated specifically with Teams and appear on the left hand rail, just a click away for anyone to use. One of these apps is a native Microsoft app called Queues and is perfect if you need to better organize and route your customer calls. Queues app is included in Teams Premium and if your organization has both a Teams Premium and Teams Phone license, the app will be available by default.

You’re probably toggling back and forth between many different apps during the day just to get your work done. With Queues app, you can stay right in Teams to manage across apps. It’s like having your personal support hub right within Teams to manage your call queues and ensure that customer calls are resolved. 

Check out these included features that can help you manage internal and external collaboration:

Make and receive calls using Teams Phone without leaving Teams.
Agents get a 360-degree view of their call queue performance through real-time statistics.
Agents can opt-in or out of call queues based on availability and business needs.
Copilot3 summarizes call notes, saving time between customer engagements.

To make sure your customer engagement team or colleagues can work on a customer issue together, the Queues app offers collaborative call handling:

Team members and leads can work together on answering calls.
Relevant call controls, such as call transfer, are easily accessible.
Outbound calls can be made on behalf of call queues or auto attendants, showing a unified team front for customers.

Supervisors can jump into customer interactions directly from Teams:

Call queues and auto-attendants can be managed directly from Teams, so no need to context switch.
Comprehensive analytics dashboards provide real-time and historical reporting.
Compliance and governance are built into the app.

How These Features Support Your Business

When you’re juggling inbound and outbound calls while managing your business, you need to concentrate on having effective conversations. So let Teams handle the call queue, and automatically capture notes and actions. Queues app makes this easier.

Queues app is now generally available and requires users to have a Teams Phone and a Teams Premium license. It’s a powerful app for enhancing customer support and engagement within Microsoft Teams. Get more details in this launch blog.
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1 Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide, Pankil Sheth, Megan Fernandez, Christopher Trueman, Rafael Benitez, 7 October 2024

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

*This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be valuated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request here.

2 Teams Phone license is a required license for call queues and auto-attendants. Teams Premium license provides access to Queues app.

3 Copilot in Teams Phone is part of Microsoft 365 Copilot license.

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