Technology Record - Issue 29: Summer 2023

INTERVIEW Enhancing the Teams experience Designed to do everything from using omnichannel connectivity to enabling workers to connect with customers and team members across the world, Microsoft Teams is a central tool for facilitating everyday enterprise communication and collaboration. As a Microsoft Gold partner, SCB Global works directly with Microsoft to offer unique solutions that make it easier for medium-sized and large enterprises to implement additional Microsoft Teams features. “We enhance Microsoft’s product by adding features to help secure and connect Teams to the public telephone network in 182 countries,” says Saif Ahmed, CEO of SCB Global. “Our solutions are native to Teams, which means that we work directly within Microsoft Azure across every continent to create a resilient and delay-free solution for our users, while simultaneously removing the need to use third-party connector tools.” SCB Global has nearly 20 years of experience within the telecommunications space, allowing it to deliver valuable calling enhancements and management capabilities to the Teams experience. For example, companies with contact centres can use SCB’s OPTO4Contact solution to provide agents with a cloudbased, omnichannel contact centre workflow tool that negates the need for any other contact centre software. Users can access everything on Teams, simplifying operations so they no longer need to jump between applications. All this is possible and is backed up by SCB Global’s team of experts, whose focus is to ease and remove all challenges associated with remote and hybrid collaboration. “Businesses no longer need separate systems for desk phones, faxing or SMS,” says Ahmed. “Integrating an organisation’s contact centre into Teams allows them to streamline the customer experience, improve better returns on investment and significantly reduce administrative time. Instead of customers ringing customer support helpline and needing to be transferred through to different departments, businesses can use OPTO4Contact to provide simultaneous connections for agents within Teams.” OPTO4Contact can also be combined with other SCB solutions to help support hybrid and remote work for employees, wherever they are located. They include a personalised OPTO4Teams solution, OPTO4Shield for enhanced security and OPTO4Edge, which is a software-defined wide area network solution that directly connects calls to Azure for voice optimisation. Now that Microsoft Teams is the centrepiece product of the Office 365 suite (which has been renamed Microsoft 365), Ahmed expects it to continue growing in popularity with businesses. “It’s so unique compared to other video and audio conferencing products like Zoom and Webex,” he says. “I believe that at some point in the near future, Teams will be the main product that everybody launches when they log onto a Microsoft desktop. And Microsoft partners like us are helping to make it easier for them by enhancing the Teams experience.” Saif Ahmed of SCB Global shares how organisations can combat connectivity and workflow challenges by implementing solutions that are native to Teams BY ALICE CHAMBERS “We enhance Microsoft’s product by adding features to help secure and connect Teams” 94

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