Recently, a colleague asked of me to, “Just imagine—that exact moment—when a customer realizes that a Microsoft product brought them the level of success they were looking for.”
At a personal level, I am grateful that Microsoft—especially in the realm of their modern workplace solutions—has already bestowed such moments upon me. So, this time around, I’m going to use our blog as a place to discuss how Microsoft Teams has the potential to bring that “moment of success” to your organization.
My Success Moment with Teams
Microsoft Teams is at the forefront of Microsoft’s modern workplace vision—which has more than 20 million daily active users. We at Connection’s Microsoft Center of Excellence saw an explosion in collaborative problem solving as we changed our group forum from an email group to a Teams channel discussion. Also, the amount of one-to-one collaboration that I had with my colleagues increased as I moved from another app. Perhaps, for me, witnessing these new patterns of productivity—enabled by Teams—was my moment of customer success.
Increase Collaboration
As your organization adopts Teams, you will notice that ad-hoc chats and virtual meetings replace physical meetings, thus increasing collaboration while decreasing your email and meeting footprints. Of course, it takes time to adapt to these patterns. But, you will recognize them as you start using Teams every day. Nothing can beat physical meetings as the highest-bandwidth communication channel, where trillions of bytes of visual and audio information are consciously and unconsciously exchanged between the sender and receiver every minute. But, how often do you need them, and do you need them at all if there is rapport established between the sender and receiver? Do you need them if there is base-level sync on the subject? What if the virtual channels can simulate—or come very close to—the effect of a high-bandwidth physical channel?
In my experience, as I started organizing virtual meetings on Teams, there was a point when I realized “well, I do have some rapport with the folks I am meeting with today. I have a base-level sync on the topic that I am going to discuss. Teams allows me to share my screen when I need to go visual. I don’t have to worry about not getting the right size meeting room for the right number of people with Teams virtual rooms.” So, I switched the follow-up meetings to virtual on Teams. In one-to-one scenarios, the chat interface in Teams gave me the confidence to switch from physical or virtual meetings to ad-hoc chats. One-on-one ad-hoc chats also reduced the number of follow-up emails I send.
How do these patterns reflect on MyAnalytics (another cool product in Office 365) dashboard? Over time, I have decreased my meetings and emails in favor of chat. This, in turn, decreased my overall collaboration time, while it increased my time to focus, which I use to write blog posts—such as this one.
Remove Progress Bottlenecks
Technology is hindering the problem it is trying to solve. This is a regular occurrence when it comes to adopting something as big as Teams. But, this effect is reduced considerably by fine-tuned chat, meeting, and calling through Skype for Business, which Microsoft repurposed for Teams. “The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Teams” a study published by Forrester, found that Meetings conducted via Teams are more reliable and of very high audio-video quality, resulting in less time spent addressing setup and call-quality issues. Switching between apps within Teams is intuitive and effortless. This reduced the adoption frustration for me. I hope anyone who adopts Teams will have a very similar experience.
The Business Perspective
Teams helps organizations put their Office 365 and Microsoft 365 (the meta bundle that encompasses Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility and Security) investments to better use. Teams binds together the various apps within Office 365 and makes the right apps available. Teams also justifies a company making additional investments in Microsoft 365, since it provides the right set of complementary technology that you need for the security and compliance around a Teams-based workforce. Conversely, Teams can be the major reason why a company decides to invest in Microsoft 365. As found in the survey mentioned above, 25% of the total value of Microsoft 365 E5 is associated with the solutions within Teams.
There are a lot of other aspects of Teams and other modern workplace solutions from Microsoft I want to discuss. I will continue using this place to share those stories. Reach out to one of our Account Managers if you have questions around Teams adoption, Skype to Teams Migration Services, the right Office 365 licenses you need for advanced functionalities within Teams, or anything else Microsoft related.
Sreeraj Vasukuttan
Sreeraj Vasukuttan is a Technical Marketing Manager at Connection with a passion for technology and marketing. He enjoys writing about cloud, security, and end-user compute. In his free time, he loves watching films, cooking, and traveling with his family.
