Contact us about migrating your contact center to Teams
© 2024 Enghouse Interactive. All Rights Reserved.
Skype for Business End-of-Life
About Enghouse Interactive
Enghouse Interactive (EI), a subsidiary of Enghouse Systems Limited (TSX: ENGH), is a leading global provider of contact center software, services, and video solutions, serving thousands of customers for over 35 years. Enghouse Interactive solutions enable customers to deliver winning customer experiences by transforming the contact center from a cost center into a powerful growth engine. Enghouse Interactive’s core values – Reliability and Choice – are key differentiators in the global marketplace. Reliability speaks to Enghouse Interactive’s reputation for consistently honoring its commitments to its customers, staff, partners, and investors. Choice is reflected in the unparalleled breadth of its CX portfolio, which enables customers to choose from a wide array of solutions, whether deployed on-premise, in the cloud, or on a hybrid platform. By leveraging a broad range of technologies and capabilities based on open standards, Enghouse Interactive simplifies the advanced integrations customers require. Respecting local regulatory requirements, and supporting any telephony technology, Enghouse Interactive ensures that its customers can be reached by their customers – anytime, anywhere, and via any channel.
Find out about an Enghouse Microsoft Teams-integrated contact centre solution.
– and your Microsoft Teams options
What you need to know about a Contact Centre with Microsoft Teams
Like Skype for Business, Teams extends the power of the contact centre to the entire organisation, allowing contact centre agents to easily collaborate with their colleagues outside the contact centre via chat or video. In addition, Teams brings dedicated team collaboration spaces to chat and share resources.
There are several options for having your call centre use Teams, including Microsoft’s own call centre solution. Microsoft itself recommends working with its valued Partners for a contact centre solution that is tightly integrated with Microsoft Teams. A third-party integrated solution offers Teams contact centres a range of essential contact centre features that are not available from Teams alone, including intelligent routing, multichannel or omnichannel interactions, comprehensive analytics on queues and agents as well as engagement. You can find a list of Microsoft certified Partner vendors here, and also get an objective view of the three current integration models available for Microsoft Teams that these vendors can use: Connect, Extend and Power.
Migrating to a Microsoft Teams Contact Centre
From 20 million users pre-pandemic to over 300 million monthly users today, Microsoft Teams has led business communications optimisation and digital transformation and changed the face of customer engagement. Organisations moving to Teams are taking their contact centres with them, empowering CX staff to respond more efficiently and effectively to customer interactions, with the benefit of easy access to the entire business to support them.
If you choose to transition your contact centre to Teams along with the rest of your organisation, there are still some important decisions to make so you can move forward with your Teams migration – for example, choosing these things:
1. A Microsoft Teams-integrated contact centre solution.
2. The best method for delivering Teams calls to your business.
3. A Microsoft Partner integrator.
When does Skype for Business become End-of-Life?
The End-of-Life date for Microsoft Skype for Business Server 2019 is 9 January 2024. It has an Extended End Date of 14 October 2025, which means only paid support and security updates are available from Microsoft after January 2024.
The End-of-Life (retirement) date for Microsoft Skype for Business Online was 31 July 2021.
What does this mean for Contact Centres using Skype for Business?
If you have a contact centre integrated with Skype for Business, it is definitely time to plan a move to a new voice platform. Already the vast majority of Enghouse contact centre customers using Skype for Business have migrated to a contact centre with Microsoft Teams.
If you would like to discuss a Teams contact center migration with us, please get in touch