More than 1.2 billion people – roughly 15% of the world’s population – use Microsoft Office. Microsoft Teams alone had 320M daily users in 2023. Let’s let that sink in.
What organizations don’t know is that Microsoft Teams can also be used as a telephony system to make inbound and outbound calls to customers, leads, colleagues – you name it. It costs a little more to add Teams Phone, but it means they can rip out and replace their expensive telephony systems and consolidate their tech stack and licenses.
The payoff is immediate, and with data fast becoming the most valuable part of any business, the race is on to capture and connect it. But before we get into the details of the Salesforce-Microsoft Teams integration, let’s address the elephant in the room.
Microsoft Teams has its own CRM, Dynamics, and Salesforce is the largest CRM vendor in the world with its own telephony and messaging services. But that doesn’t mean these two behemoths can’t share their toys sometimes, offering huge advantages to those who connect them.
In this article, we explain why businesses are using Microsoft Teams Phone as their only telephony system and connecting it to Salesforce to enhance revenue and operations.
1. Call Data Is Valuable Data: It Pays to Capture It Properly
Many businesses aren’t aware that they can use Microsoft Teams as a phone system or, thanks to an integration developed by technology solutions provider Mirage, connect it to Salesforce.
It leaves them on the back foot on two fronts:
- They either use a separate, costly phone system that isn’t integrated with Salesforce.
- They’re not leveraging Microsoft Teams as a phone system at all.
Disconnected systems means disconnected data. And with call data being highly valuable fuel for creating customer service and sales insights, it’s important that it’s captured, stored, and utilized effectively.
Mirage’s Microsoft Teams connector for Salesforce presents a unique opportunity for organizations that want to save on telephony expenditure while boosting operations and business intelligence.
2. Why Businesses Are Connecting Microsoft Teams Phone and Salesforce
- It’s future-ready: Combining Teams with a specific Microsoft Teams Phone license provides a future-ready, rapidly deployable solution that leverages your existing IT infrastructure and feels familiar to employees who are already using Microsoft Teams in their everyday workflow.
- It’s fully remote and cloud-based: As remote working has become par for the course, staff can use Microsoft Teams to sidestep the technological and physical limitations of office-based systems and landlines. A cloud-based system, Microsoft Teams allows them to make and take calls from anywhere, across any device, connecting cubicles and home comforts for hybrid workers.
- It reduces the IT stack: It also consolidates and coordinates resources by reducing the number of vendors and contracts to manage, allowing IT teams to administer a worldwide telephone system from one system. They can easily integrate it with Salesforce, too.
3. Manage Calls Entirely Within Salesforce
Sourcing contact details, dialing numbers, recording call notes, and follow-up actions… These are usually laborious and manual tasks that drain time and resources for Salesforce customers who have separate, disconnected telephony systems.
It also, perhaps most importantly, results in incomplete or inaccurate data recording due to human error and a lack of motivation for inputting data (a natural result of a repetitive manual process).
When you connect your telephony system or Microsoft Teams Phone with Salesforce, you’ll be able to manage 100% of inbound and outbound calls and capture important call data in detail alongside your customer records.
4. Prepare for an AI-Powered Future
Great – you’ve automatically captured that all-important customer data. Now the fun begins. Feed that data into AI-enabled Salesforce Einstein or Agentforce and you’ll be able to gain deep insights into customers: what they need, why they need it, and how you’re best positioned to give it to them.
This is good news not only for sales reps but also for business intelligence teams who rely on detailed reporting and analytics to make smarter, faster decisions.
5. Send Sales Soaring
By connecting your Microsoft Teams Phone system with Salesforce, you’ll get closer to customers, convert more leads, capture more commission – and you’ll do all of this faster.
More comprehensive and error-free data gives you a better understanding of prospects and leads on the other end of the phone. The support doesn’t stop when you hang up; automated call logging takes the hard work out of call notes and follow-ups.
6. Keep Customers Happy – Not Hanging Around
Your customers expect – and deserve – the best. They don’t want to wait around while you dig out call records from a different app or coordinate caller details with customer history.
By integrating Salesforce and Microsoft Teams Phone, you can gain immediate access to complete case records, customer history, and caller/contact insights at a glance, leading to faster resolutions and satisfied customers. Department heads, meanwhile, can drive operational efficiency through detailed live reports that show the number of ongoing calls, which agents are taking them, who’s in a queue, and even who’s busy in a meeting.
Using these details about presence status means supervisors can allocate resources most effectively depending on team needs, customer demand, and call volume.
One System to Call Them All
Consolidating your tech stack with a Salesforce and Microsoft Teams Phone integration means you can stay on the front foot in two crucial ways:
- Better operations: Staff can work faster, more comfortably, and more efficiently by managing every call in Salesforce without needing to jump between disparate systems, resulting in gains measured not only in time and money but also in morale.
- More sales: Armed with the best tools for the job, staff can make and take more calls, and they can do so using highly accurate data. They’ll be able to close more deals, more quickly, while satisfying customers that they’re getting the best possible experience.
Take your call operations and volumes to the next level with Mirage. Visit the AppExchange to download the Microsoft Teams for Salesforce app and level up your telephony.
Summary
By integrating Microsoft Teams Phone and Salesforce, you can achieve a telephony system that offers huge advantages to your teams – including capturing valuable data without manual work, harnessing AI more effectively, and increasing sales.