Microsoft Teams ecosystem grows through collaborations with Genesys, Telstra

Genesys, a global provider of cloud customer experience and contact centre solutions, has expanded its Microsoft partnership with a new, native integration, allowing contact centre agents to collaborate with any employee using Teams.

Microsoft Teams and Genesys Cloud, a public cloud contact centre platform, now give employees a more connected, intuitive and productive experience. Instead of toggling between different systems on multiple devices to get in touch with others, contact centre employees can call them using Teams from within Genesys Cloud.

When agents need to consult with a subject-matter expert outside of the contact centre, they can use the integrated directory, search and presence features to find the Teams user with the right expertise from within their Genesys Cloud desktop. They can determine availability and collaborate in real time with a single click. This facilitates teamwork, knowledge sharing and results in faster resolution for customers.

“We are thrilled to add yet another element to our long-standing partnership with Microsoft, which marks an important step forward in helping our customers deliver on the promise of Experience as a Service,” said Olivier Jouve, Executive VP and GM, Genesys Cloud.

“With more than 75 million daily active users, Microsoft Teams is a predominant unified communications and productivity tool for thousands of enterprise organisations. By integrating our platform with Teams, employees can draw upon expertise from anywhere in the organisation so they can provide experiences tailored for every customer.”

Mike Ammerlaan, Director of Microsoft 365 Ecosystem marketing at Microsoft said, “More organisations recognise that employees throughout the business contribute to outstanding customer experiences – not just those in the contact centre. The Genesys Cloud and Microsoft Teams integration helps ensure employees are equipped with the right tools to collaborate with colleagues across the enterprise while benefiting from features like advanced routing, call recording and interaction analytics to deliver consistent service.”

The news follows the global launch of Telstra Calling for Microsoft Teams, a fully-digitised cloud solution that enables telephony services through Microsoft Teams on Office 365 for multinational corporations.

Within the Asia Pacific region, the solution will be available in Hong Kong and New Zealand in August, and in Singapore in October, before being extended further from December.

According to Telstra, three quarters of organisations globally are introducing new or expanding existing investments in cloud-based collaboration applications such as Microsoft Teams* as COVID-19 changes work styles. After organisations move more workloads into Office 365 – usually starting with Outlook, SharePoint and others – telephony is the next logical workload to migrate into the ecosystem.

Telstra Calling for Microsoft Teams supports organisations looking to adopt Microsoft Teams as its primary unified communications tool by expanding and improving the depth of their enterprise telephony capabilities. The solution uses an organisation’s existing Teams capability, without needing to worry about buying, installing, provisioning or managing on-premises infrastructure.

Features include:

- One dedicated phone number (DID) – for 1:1, team conference calls, local and national long distance calls

- Supports remote working – quickly scale users, add new phone numbers, top up calling plans; each user receives a DID linked to Office 365 with full number portability

- Enhanced employee experience – boosts productivity by combining voice and collaboration tools in one familiar application

- Offload IT management – avoid the headaches of managing and supporting disparate on-site private branch exchanges (PBXs), physical phone handsets and a dedicated voice network

- Full voice functions – including traditional PBX call-handling functions like call, hold, transfer, forwarding and voicemail, all in the cloud

“A staggering 98% of enterprises believe there will be a far greater reliance on remote collaboration, replacing face-to-face meetings post COVID-19 recovery*, which means from now on, organisations need to empower employees to work wherever they are. From our initial launch in Australia, we found customers had a clear preference to move away from phones-on-desktops, to integrated telephony capabilities and collaboration tools, and we are thrilled to be able to extend this great product to our global customers,” said Oliver Camplin-Warner, Telstra International CEO.

“Telstra is a trusted partner of Microsoft and we are glad to take our collaboration to a new level. Telstra Calling for Microsoft Teams will help our customers collaborate and communicate effectively across devices and networks, by leveraging the modern experiences in Teams and the Telstra network,” said Mahendra Sekaran, Executive Director of Product and Operations at Microsoft.

* The research, Business Continuity, Flexible Working and Adaptive Infrastructure: 5 Actions for When the Economy Reopens (May 2020), gathered data from 120+ business leaders across Asia Pacific, Europe and the US to provide insights on how to recalibrate their IT strategies. The research was conducted with GlobalData to survey C-suites and IT decision-makers to understand organisations’ responses to the pandemic.