During the first day of Ignite, Marissa Salazar, Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft Teams announced 7 exciting new Teams features. Most of these are top features requested in the past year by users.

One of the major improvements that Teams made over Skype for Business was the introduction of Direct Routing. In the SFB world, an onprem topology could be connected to the cloud for hybrid voice, but the architecture was complicated, and there were several restrictions.

One of the strengths of ice Contact Center has always been the application integration possibilities we offer. In the 30 years we’ve been in the industry, we’ve integrated into both commercial and bespoke CRM systems, databases of various stripes, workforce management platforms, and countless other systems of record. While no two integrations are alike, there are some systems such as Dynamics 365, that are used far more often than others and certain integration points that are common and repeatable. This post highlights a few areas where you can use ice Contact Center to tie into the Microsoft 365 platform, including Graph, PowerApps, and Azure.

The ice Contact Center already has full support for Microsoft Teams. Using the Teams client in conjunction with iceBar not only gives agents advanced call controls, but also screen pop and application integrations, visibility into the state of queues, and specialized and granular state controls that go beyond what Teams offers natively. This made for a great first step, but for organizations that are all in on Teams, we wanted to make the integration tighter and enhance the agent and supervisor experience.

As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, member of TAP, and with three gold competencies and two silver competencies, there’s no doubt that ComputerTalk has strong ties with Microsoft. We are pleased to announce that you can now connect with us on Microsoft's destination for business apps.

The ComputerTalk team is heading to Orlando, FL from November 4-8 for Microsoft Ignite 2019!

More and more customers are turning to social media when contacting an organization. They are using the communication platforms they use in their everyday lives and expect increased customer service when their issues are exposed in public. The expectations have gone from waiting to hear back through emails exchanges to instant responses and fluid back and forth conversations with contact center agents.

Follow Fan Fred below as he interacts with his favorite sports team, the iceville Beavers. See how the iceville Beavers enhanced Fan Fred’s experience throughout the season which lead to increased ticket sales.

Last autumn, my colleague and I conducted an internal survey asking ComputerTalk staff, "What is your biggest pain point when contacting an organization?" We found that many pain points can easily be solved with simple contact center features and don’t require complex solution overhauls. Your customers might have experienced some of these pain points when contacting your organization. Here are some simple and easy ways to overcome those challenges:

If Microsoft Teams is your organization’s final destination, there are many paths to get there and several resources online that can help guide you through the process. There are factors to consider such as whether or not to use calling plans or direct routing, how and when to migrate Skype for Business users’ meetings, and how to stage upgrades so that users can still collaborate while in different upgrade modes.