Explore an Efficient Way to Enable Telephony Within Microsoft Teams

During times of crisis, businesses are forced to adapt. Covid-19 has accelerated changes to the way people execute their business plans, with more people working from home than ever before. 

Recent research has shown that 94% of enterprises are already using the cloud in some form or another, with 66% having a central cloud team. 

With this said, there are still too many businesses that rely on traditional telephone communications. 

It is essential for businesses to evolve and combine digital and cloud communications with PBX telephone systems to create business continuity. 

Why move your telephony to the cloud? 

Before diving into the ins and outs of migrating communications to the cloud, here are a couple of interesting facts and figures. 

Microsoft Teams report usage increase

On March 31, Microsoft Teams saw a new daily record of 2.7 billion meeting minutes in one day, up from 900 million on March 16. This was at the height of the pandemic. In addition, the number of weekly Teams mobile users grew more than 300% from early February to March 31. 

Global Workplace Analytics forecast big rise in home working

A large section of the global workforce has been forced to work remotely due to Covid-19 restrictions. Global Workplace Analytics predicts this trend will continue in 2021. They forecast that by the end of the year, 25 to 30% of the global workforce will be working from home multiple days a week. 

Unified communications sector shows strong market growth

Synergy Research revealed that the unified communications industry is growing by 29% per year. This growth is attributed to companies integrating digital and telephone PBX communications through the cloud. 

In this new era, companies have realised the efficiency and continuity benefits that are achieved by unifying communications through the cloud. To stay ahead of the competition, it is vital that businesses transfer PBX communications to integrate with digital communications as soon as possible. 

Moving to the cloud is easier than ever 

Rather than trying to unify all your communications at once, it’s now possible with some cloud communications providers to migrate to the cloud gradually. By doing so, deployment time is reduced, and disruption minimised. 

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The coronavirus pandemic has accelerated the need to switch to digital business processes and unify communications. For IT managers and SME owners, this has brought about a new set of priorities. These include: 

• Enterprise-ready security capabilities – Secure and reliable communications are a high priority for all businesses in the digital age. Personal data and sensitive information is protected by regulation such as GDPR. 
• Bring-your-own-carrier (BYOC) – Many businesses are keen to keep their preferred carrier, so that everything is consolidated centrally on the cloud.   

Enabling remote telephone calls from Microsoft Teams 

Your company can become more productive and efficient by allowing employees to work from anywhere and make and receive phone calls within Microsoft Teams.  

For example, if your company wants to move its telephony to the cloud. There are plenty of apps that allow you to do this but require users to log into a separate platform. It’s far more efficient to use Microsoft Teams’ calling capabilities without the need to change applications.  

Using a cloud comms solution that enables a direct routing approach in the Microsoft Teams environment, calls can be recorded and routed to the right person easily. Also, companies can port numbers without having to change them, avoiding all the hassle that this creates.   

This also means if your company has a large number of staff working from home, you can receive calls directly within Teams. A CRM integration brings customer information directly to their screen. All the data is centralised, so that the support agent can focus on helping the customer rather than tracking down information.    

A better way to enable telephony within Microsoft Teams

The current trend for remote working is showing no sign of slowing. In fact, it is likely to increase dramatically over the next decade. This means that more and more businesses need to unify their communications by moving to cloud-based software.   

With Toku you can transfer PBX to the cloud and empower your employees to make and receive global calls with your preferred carrier in the familiar Microsoft Teams environment. It also improves customer experience as they will receive a more focused and streamlined service. As an added bonus, monitoring and analysing your call telephony in the cloud through one application makes things much easier for your employees.

No longer will they be forced to switch applications to manage external global calling.