As technology innovates at an unparalleled pace, organizations race to keep up with the latest communication technologies. For the past few years, UCaaS companies like Ring Central, 8×8, and Fuze dominated the communications landscape. Recently, Microsoft Teams has gained market share and is positioned to replace traditional hosted communications providers as a single application for calling, chat, meetings and texting that natively integrates with Office 365. As Microsoft Teams becomes the all-in-one collaboration solution going forward, organizations still using traditional on-premise and UCaaS may want to consider the improvements offered by Microsoft Teams.

Forrester Consulting has determined that Microsoft Teams could provide a return on investment up to 832%. Additionally, they found that 45% of companies with more than 500 employees stated Microsoft could help them achieve their collaboration goals.

Here are three ways Microsoft Teams helps improve Collaboration:

Improved Experience

Microsoft Teams was designed to simplify group work by leveraging natively designed chat, video, collaborations, and conferencing. With the addition of PSTN calling through direct dialing partners, organizations can reduce the number of applications needed for a single communications interface. Additionally, built for a mobile first workforce, collaborating across softphone and remote mobile users has been streamlined into a single app.

Decreased App Overload

Through the integration of the aforementioned apps, workers can simplify their daily tasks. Ring Central, 8×8, and others built these in their platforms, but the integration into Office 365 has streamlined these applications to help reduce the amount of applications used. According to Call Tower, using a single app for all collaboration services can save up to 8 hours per week.

Increased Automation & Artificial Intelligence (AI)

The Microsoft Teams platform brings built-in automation tools that help save both time and money. Formerly called Flow, the Power Automate tool helps users automate routing tasks, such as creating apps and managing other tasks. The most recent July 2020 update brought the addition of Cortana to the Teams Room devices as well. Cortana allows users to leverage the AI tool within their meetings to add users, send chat messages, and share files.