In a relatively short space of time, Microsoft Teams evolved from being a simple solution for business collaboration to a crucial investment for end-to-end team synchronisation. When the pandemic hit in 2020, demand for a flexible, agile productivity solution like Teams skyrocketed. In fact, throughout the pandemic, adoption rates for Microsoft Teams grew by over 90%.
Unfortunately, while there are clearly many benefits to leveraging Teams in today’s digital workplace, many companies are struggling to unlock the full value of the ecosystem. The rapid implementation of the technology during the pandemic led to a relatively rushed deployment for many brands.
Today, IT decision-makers who began their journey into Teams a couple of years ago are beginning to question whether they’re really making the most of their technology. After all, in an unpredictable economic environment, a company’s success depends on its ability to optimise its toolkit.
Are You Missing Out on the Benefits of Microsoft Teams?
The move to cloud communications and the Teams landscape marks a major investment decision for many organisations. As the list of features and capabilities available within Teams has continued to expand and grow, the opportunities available to companies leveraging this platform are greater than ever. However, while Teams offers phenomenal potential, it’s still up to business leaders to ensure they’re leveraging the most value from their investment.
For many companies, the first step to determining whether Teams is truly delivering the best ROI is asking a few simple questions:
Is Low Adoption Reducing Cost Savings Opportunities?
One of the things that make Microsoft Teams such a powerful solution for today’s transforming businesses is its versatility. More than just a collaboration tool, Microsoft Teams is a full platform solution for UC&C, productivity, and team synchronization.
Used correctly, it eliminates the need for other legacy voice services and tools outside of the cloud, which could be draining business budgets with expensive equipment, maintenance, and hardware requirements. Unfortunately, while 270 million people were using Microsoft Teams as of December 2022, only around 12 million were utilising its enterprise voice capabilities.
If your company isn’t taking advantage of the full migration to cloud voice Microsoft Teams can support, you could be missing out on huge savings.
What’s more, if your company has transitioned to cloud voice in Teams, if you’re not ensuring your team members have fully adopted these tools, your potential ROI could be limited. The more non-adopters your team has, the more you miss out on savings for voice calls, data, and expensive B2B mobile calls.
Are the Full Employee Benefits Being Realized?
Thanks to its unified approach to communication and collaboration, Microsoft Teams provides businesses with a number of valuable money-saving opportunities. But the benefits of the platform go far beyond cost savings alone. According to the Total Economic Impact of Microsoft Teams report, Microsoft Teams delivers benefits such as:
- Improved efficiency: Information workers save anywhere up to 4 hours per week on Teams, thanks to improved collaboration and information sharing. The efficiency boost can save businesses over $14.3 million within just 3 years.
- Reduced travel: By year 3 of adopting teams, online meetings in most companies replace an average of 150 overnight trips. Moving to a unified experience in Teams helps to eliminate travel expenses, and reduce a company’s environmental impact.
- Faster decision-making: In a world where agility is crucial, Microsoft Teams helps decision-makers make the right choices up to 17.7% faster. Having resources and information readily available in Teams, alongside shared workspaces where staff can confer ensures companies can grow and evolve at a faster rate.
Perhaps most importantly, Microsoft Teams can also improve worker satisfaction and reduce attrition rates from approximately 11.8% to 11.4%. Fewer lost employees mean businesses spend less time training and recruiting new staff, and more time unlocking new opportunities.
If companies are just looking at Teams as a way to reduce legacy equipment costs, they’re missing the comprehensive value the platform can deliver.
Are Services Moved into Teams Being Managed Efficiently?
As a flexible, and versatile platform for communication, collaboration and productivity, Microsoft Teams empowers companies to bring more of their tools together in one unified space. The fewer apps and tools team members need to jump between, the more productive they’ll be.
However, even companies who have already begun to move more of their services into Teams may not be managing their solutions effectively. For instance, brands taking advantage of Teams’ enterprise voice solutions may not be managing, monitoring, and reviewing users, peripherals and phone numbers and licences as often as they should be.
Leveraging the right tools to effectively manage and configure Teams for the needs of each employee ensures you can truly generate the biggest benefit from your investment.
How to Upgrade your Microsoft Teams ROI
The good news for business owners continuing to invest in their Microsoft Teams roadmap is the ecosystem does have sensational value to offer. The key to success is making sure you’re using the resources available to you correctly. To boost the ROI of Microsoft Teams, every business should be focusing on three core areas:1. Cost savings from legacy and mobile voice:
Ensure your organisation can move fully into the cloud environment offered by Teams for both inbound and outbound voice.
Solutions are available to replace old legacy technology, and these offerings are becoming increasingly imperative at a time when PTSN and IDSN lines will soon be switched off. Even the most complex contact centre requirements can now be met within Teams.2. Invest in employee empowerment:
Boost adoption and employee efficiency by delivering the right education and onboarding programmes to staff members. Consider implementing a champions programme to guide more staff members towards Teams and explore ways of enabling the hybrid workforce.
Invest in ensuring every staff member can leverage Teams effectively, and take advantage of frequent feature updates as they emerge. The benefits will include everything from better productivity and collaboration to reduced document management overheads and greater adoption.3. Monitor and review:
Like any strategy for digital transformation or brand growth, the implementation of Microsoft Teams isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it project. Companies should be searching for ways to monitor and review the ROI of their investment.
With the Teams admin centre and third-party apps like Resonate’s Teams Voice Tooling, companies can more effectively manage Teams services, and see whether:
- They have the right number of phone numbers and licenses in place
- They’ve right-sized their network for voice requirements
- Home user networks or disparate equipment choices are impacting the service performance
- VIP or heavy users are unlocking the best quality of service
Unlock the Right ROI from Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams can deliver phenomenal benefits to a huge range of businesses in today’s digital landscape. However, companies need to ensure they’re making the most of the benefits the platform can provide. Implementing the right strategies can make all the difference to your overall ROI.
As this change and adoption case study shows, using experts like Resonate can increase adoption and improve employee engagement. In this instance, results included:
- Email usage reduced by 25%
- A 250% higher use of SharePoint
- The recruitment of 850 technology champions unifying teams through stronger collaborative practices
Make sure you’re also getting the best ROI from Microsoft Teams by speaking to Resonate today.
