March 11, 2024
Skype for Business’ end-of-life date arrived in July 2021. Microsoft’s popular video conferencing platform first became available in 2015. Since then, many online team meetings becoming synonymous with, “Jumping on a Skype call”. Despite Skype’s end-of-life date, Skype for Business is still available, but without support. And all patches and security updates will become unavailable on October the 14th, 2025.
Many small businesses were auto-upgraded to Microsoft Teams, the company’s platform of choice. But if you’re a medium or large-sized organisation then you may have extended your support date while you weighed up your alternatives. Are you considering migrating your business communications from Skype for Business to Teams? This article will show you how Anywhere365® can take away the pain and enable you to confidently make the decision.
We Loved Skype for Business and We Love Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams offers all the capabilities of Skype for Business. And more. You can participate in chat messages, as well as video and audio calls, on both mobile and desktop. You can bring together users, search channels, share files, and hold virtual meetings. What we really love is how your availability can be automatically updated based on your activities or manually enforced.
But migration from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams is far more than an upgrade. Let’s jump into some of the more unique features and how Anywhere365® leverages those to enhance your everyday business communications.
Better Customer Calls, Happier Service Reps
Inside Teams, you can efficiently take, transfer, and mute calls. And with Anywhere365® you can reduce your customer service workload even further and boost their productivity. We have several AI integrations, but you may also bring your own bots. From any vendor. And you can choose to only route more complicated customer problems or questions to live agents. Based on agents’ skills, location, IVR prompts, VIP customers, and more.
Zero code contact center automation
Customers tell us that agent attrition rates since the Covid pandemic have been challenging. But adding conversational AI in the right way can significantly enhance employee satisfaction. Even during the #GreatResignation. By sharing the workload with conversational AI, employees experience less stress and get to focus on more complex and rewarding customer issues. To make this even easier we have developed our unique zero code contact center automation toolbox, called Dialogue Studio.
Enhance Workforce Efficiency, Encourage Collaboration
Microsoft Teams integrates beautifully with other applications in the Microsoft ecosystem. And as such, switching to Teams with Anywhere365® can provide a real boost to your everyday workflows, collaboration, and your teams’ overall productivity.
We make full use of the software your people are already familiar with. For example, supervisors can use PowerBI reports and web wallboards to monitor queue activity to see if key performance indicators are being met.
With Anywhere365® you can leverage all your existing investments in the Microsoft ecosystem into the contact center and beyond.
Provide a Seamless Omnichannel Experience for Your Customers
With Anywhere365® in combination with Microsoft Teams, you can communicate through every thinkable channel and across different devices, including both mobile and desktop. Anywhere365® lets you dock Teams client to your customers’ preferred channels and even enables them to deflect between them. For example, they can deflect from your voice channel to WhatsApp when they’re on mobile. They can do this without the hassle of hanging up, saving your WhatsApp number and starting a conversation.
We provide seamless CRM integrations into the world’s leading solutions to recognize a customer based on all the information that you have. Your employees can use all the data at their fingertips to offer a truly personalized experience to your customers.
Data, Data & Data
With Anywhere365® you can also track and manage your customer interactions across different touchpoints. This ensures insights into your customers’ entire customer journey. Even beyond the contact center. This is possible because you don’t just open up Teams for the contact center. Any enterprise user can be part of any conversation. This can help your team to address customers’ issues and questions faster and more effectively, levelling up the customer experience.
The CRM integrations automatically present customers’ information to representatives before calls are answered. It doesn’t matter if that’s data from Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, or another leading data solution. You will provide a more personalized experience that doesn’t depend on a customer repeating personal information — 38% of customers’ most hated aspect of customer service interactions.
Choosing to Switch from Skype for Business to Teams?
Anxious about a potential move to Teams? We understand! Unfortunately, we can’t help you with the transition ourselves, but our rich network of highly capable partners will gladly help you out. Feel free to reach out to us for some guidance.
There are many benefits to migrating to Microsoft Teams. The platform offers all the benefits that you enjoyed before Skype for Business end of life. And more. From the ability to host a range of online events to call routing capabilities. In addition, you can further enhance your customer experiences and gain deeper insights into your audience by pairing Teams with Anywhere365®.
