The Channel Partner Guide for Voice Enabling Microsoft Teams Part 1
Daily Brew: Part 1 of 5: Special 1 Week Event from SIPPIO
Creating New Streams of Recurring Revenue by Driving Value with SIPPIO
This week, take a quick daily coffee break and invest some time learning more about Microsoft Direct Routing and SIPPIO. Grab your favorite brew and spend a little time on this growing trend and opportunity to Put Voice in Microsoft Teams. We’ve packaged these into short, 10 min reads and at the end of the week, we will provide a conversation guide for you to share with your customers interested in learning how to gain more value from Microsoft Teams.
SECURE CUSTOMERS: PROMOTE RENEWALS AND NEW BUSINESS
The events of the past year have created permanent change in how and where people work. Solution providers are grappling with retaining existing customers and in many cases are resorting to offering unprecedented discounts and slashing profit margins to prevent customer exodus where they are not readily able to showcase future value.
In Q4 2020, Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA) survey results showed 60 percent of service providers believe that renewals will remain a major concern throughout 2021 and 2022. This creates an opportunity to pause and reflect on the ‘what’s next’ wave of opportunity for your business and continue trusted advisor relationships with your customers.
With cloud-based collaboration solutions accelerating digital transformations, solution providers can quickly pivot to offer new solutions and services to help customers adapt quickly. TSIA Research’s paper by Thomas Lah, “The State of the Technology Industry 2021: The Haves and the Have Nots,” highlights two key customer trends:
1) Moving focus away from the abundance of feature/function towards requiring value and business outcomes in solutions
2) Seeking to leverage ‘as a service’ offerings versus owning technology assets
With employees no longer tethered to a single location, deploying cloud-based unified communications and collaboration services has emerged as a top priority. In a January 2021 call with investors, Microsoft reported Azure grew 50%, which continues a trend of acceleration in products that support working and learning from home. In addition, third-party, custom-built apps in Teams has grown seven times year over year and Teams now has over 60m+ active daily mobile users in addition to desktop usage.
The Microsoft Opportunity
Organizations invested in any number of enterprise Microsoft subscriptions have access to various ‘flavors’ of Microsoft Teams. To help customers maximize productivity, channel partner can offer valuable guidance to customers in how to harness the full value and utility of Microsoft Teams.
Kevin Kieller, Microsoft aficionado and co-founder of EnableUC, echoed his belief in this strategy. In a recent interview with BC Strategies, Kieller highlighted his firm’s ability to help organizations maximize the full utility of Microsoft’s ecosystem as a key factor for their continued growth.
A majority of these businesses, according to Kieller, attribute their ability to keep functioning over the past year to Microsoft Teams. The platform’s popularity is undisputed. When empowered with native calling capabilities, Microsoft Teams becomes a single hub for accessing productivity, communications and collaboration business applications.
Kieller confirmed Microsoft Teams’ efficacy as an end-to-end platform, adding that when his customers question Teams viability as an enterprise-grade PBX, he advises them that if Office 365 is working well for them, they should explore adding voice calling. Benefits associated with using Microsoft Teams as a sole communications and collaboration platform are many:
A single interface and repository for all collaboration needs
Cloud based and agile innovation adds new features on a consistent, monthly basis
Leveraging a single network infrastructure reduces costs and complexity
Highly secure, redundant, global footprint facilitates an enterprise expansion, divestiture & change
Unprecedented adoption of productivity and collaboration tools, like Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams, illustrates how service providers can create new streams of monthly recurring revenue while reducing churn and preserving renewals. In the next installment of this series, we’ll explore the various strategies for voice enabling Microsoft Teams.