Leverage Microsoft Teams as a Business Platform

Leveraging Microsoft Teams as a Business Platform

What is Microsoft Teams?

At its core, Teams is a chat, online meeting, and document collaboration platform.
Beyond that, Teams represents a unique opportunity for you and your organization to bring together disparate and siloed applications on to a single platform.
Microsoft realizes the opportunity this represents and continue to invest heavily in building out the capabilities and feature sets within Teams.
We’ve seen our clients take advantage of this capability to improve business processes by establishing a common platform for chat and collaboration.
Teams can be transformational, taking mundane and repetitive tasks and standardize on one platform to drive efficiency within the organization.
There are many uses cases that Teams represents to combine or even replace business applications with an organization.
Leaf has helped companies use Teams as a platform to extend, scale, and grow the impact Teams has on the organization. There is potential to strategically leverage MS Teams to impact far reaching areas of your business.
View Part 1: Extend, Scale, and Grow the Impact of MS Teams.

Eliminating Repetitive Tasks

How can Microsoft Teams be leveraged to eliminate and or replace redundant and inefficient tasks in your organization?
Let’s say you have a sales team making outgoing phone calls. They only want to make that call when that company is open. Prior to making the phone call, a spreadsheet, post-it note, or colleague had to be involved to help find those business hours. Once armed with that information, the original application is accessed, and the phone call is made. This back and forth between applications takes the user out of context and needlessly eats up a lot of time.
By leveraging the capabilities of Microsoft Teams, the business hours lookup can be integrated with a chat bot, instantly retrieving information with a simple company inquiry. The chat bot can be programmed to access the data that was once housed separately. The sales agent stays within the same context, saving time, and making more phone calls. Adding these time savings across your organization nets big benefits. This simple example represents one of many use cases we have encountered that result in significant benefits to the organization.
Microsoft has invested heavily in extending and building out a platform that can now be customized in ways that required custom programming in the past. If you’re intrigued by how Teams can further be expanded and deployed within your organization to surface business critical actions, let’s start a conversation.
View Part 2: Eliminating Repetitive Tasks.

Combining Business Applications Under One Common Platform

Businesses we work with often have multiple business applications they work with to run their day-to-day operations - one may be for sales, one for operations, one for marketing, and one for customer service. End users bounce between these applications throughout the workday.
When the amount of time savings is added if those activities and applications were brought under a single platform, that could represent significant change for an organization.
While Teams does not replace those applications, it does represent a consolidation platform. What we’ve seen with our customers is we can leverage the tools Microsoft has created to bring together those business applications onto a single platform.
Teams becomes the vehicle by which we can surface and ultimately deploy those applications.
We are seeing organizations that have a large user base in Teams – currently used for chat, collaboration, and video conferencing – seamlessly integrate formerly siloed business applications into Teams. This creates synergy and efficiency that saves hours of time per day. This can have an immense impact on the productivity of the organization.
View Part 3: Combining Business Applications Under One Platform.

We can partner with your organization to surface these types of opportunities to make your business more efficient. We can take disparate systems and bring them together. We’d love the opportunity to start a conversation.