During this spring, many of us have adopted Microsoft Teams as our daily tool. Teams is a hub which enables communication and collaboration within and between organizations. But did you know that there are plenty of applications inside Teams, that ease up your work even more?
Most of us use Teams for chatting, sharing files and keeping meetings but there are loads of other possibilities, too. Fewer organizations and users take the full advantage of the Teams tabs, ready-made applications, Power Platform and Office 365 services in Teams. Not to mention custom made native Teams solutions! The below picture illustrates the typical usage of Teams in organizations based on our experience.
What is your company’s maturity level of utilizing Teams?
How to utilize the full potential of Teams?
The familiar use and functionalities of Teams can be expanded with different applications. Why would you do that? It is no longer enough to compete purely on products or services. How an organization delivers for customers is becoming as important as what it delivers. The best organizations will also adapt their processes, cultures and mind-sets to manage and optimise the entire customer experience. What is needed is full attention to the overall system for delivering business and customer value. With Teams applications it is for example possible to optimize and streamline some internal processes and to build a link between organization and its customers.
There are also other concrete reasons to expand the usage of Teams with applications:
- creating a better digital work experience in your organization
- to reduce the context switching in changing the apps
- to utilize all the Office apps and other tools diversely
- use the full potential of the acquired licences
There are ready-made third-party and Microsoft applications which can be taken into use in Teams. It’s also possible to build custom applications for your organization’s own needs. The interest in this has increased during this year and it will be further emphasized. Follow these steps in your organization to rise on the next maturity level with Teams.
Start to utilize the ready-made applications in Teams
There are hundreds of different applications which are available to use in Teams. Just press … from the panel on the left-hand side in the Teams. Typical applications such as Planner, Forms, Shifts and OneNote are available to further improve the work efficiency in Teams.
Develop your own custom application
As Teams’ use as a day-to-day collaboration platform has increased significantly, creating organization’s own custom applications makes a lot of sense. While considering the modernization of some of the current business systems, why not build them native in Teams (or with Power Apps) because Teams is used daily anyway. The application itself can be as simple or as complex as needed.
It is for example possible to fetch data from customers’ digital channels or from external systems through integration(s) using Azure Integration Services. The data is handled in a Teams application using workflows and the processes can be automated with Power Automate. This can be tinted with Teams’ familiar collaboration features, Power BI data visualization and even automating processes with AI. Additionally, the Teams application can be further integrated to other stakeholders’ systems. This way Teams can act as a comprehensive back office system which integrates the end-customers from CX layer to an organization.
Microsoft Teams is a versatile collaboration platform which can help the organization to modernize not only its legacy systems but also its culture and processes to a more modern direction. During this spring, it has been proven that Teams enables a seamless collaboration and working from home. Next it is time to leverage its usage with applications and take the full power out of Teams apps and Office 365 services.
Got you interested? We are here for you!
Are you interested in figuring out how to get to the next level with Teams? We have an approach to help you to investigate and ideate the possibilities for Teams applications. Connect with me on LinkedIn to learn more!
Niina is a sales and business development professional in the customer experience unit in TietoEVRY. She helps the customers to re-think, re-image and transform their business and customer engagement models, as well as core customer-facing processes. Her passion is to help the customers in building full lifecycle digital services (e-commerce, digital marketing and sales, customer service, digital channels) and utilizing data and analytics to unlock the value of customer experience.