This is the fourth and final installment of my Four-Part series revealing the findings from recent research conducted with the healthcare, higher education and government (local and central) segments of the public sector. In case you missed it, Part One explored how the pandemic impacted digital transformations, the shared responsibility of delivering the customer experience, and some challenges organisations face with empowering staff to deliver those experiences. Part Two uncovered the generational divide and how it’s creating unique challenges and opportunities for public sector organisations, and Part Three reviewed the communications capabilities public sector professionals identified as required to enhance their ability to deliver excellent experiences. In this installment, I’ll share how public sector organisations can take their Microsoft Teams deployments from good to great.

No one in the cloud communications industry will admit it, but we’re all a little envious of how Microsoft Teams has been so quickly adopted across the public sector. Overall, respondents confirmed the wide adoption of Microsoft Teams, with 92% of them indicating they’re using Microsoft Teams for internal communications. There’s not much difference between the industries with Healthcare organisations using it, the least at 89% followed by Education at 91%. Government organisations have adopted it the most, coming in at 98%. This research has a 95% confidence interval, so the results are +/- 5% so it’s defensible to conclude that Microsoft Teams is being used by most public sector organisations.

Does your organisation use Microsoft Teams for internal communication?

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In our discussions with public sector organisations, many had significant technology gaps in their communications capabilities when the pandemic hit. They had to scramble and quickly put remote working capabilities in place (see part one of this series for the details). Now that almost everyone has deployed Microsoft Teams, we asked how they are using it. As expected, it’s being used for collaboration through video meetings and internal messaging. About 55% of organisations use it for internal phone calls and 44% use it for external phone calls. Very few organisations are using it for contact centre and switchboard, which makes sense, as Microsoft Teams doesn’t provide those capabilities.

How is Microsoft Teams used in your organisation today?

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There are interesting differences between the industries regarding how they use Microsoft Teams –

  • Internal video meetings: all organisations use this capability the most, and about at the same rate of 80% - 85%
  • External video meetings: used most by Education and Healthcare organisations at 79% and 75% respectively. Government organisations use external video meetings the least at 59%
  • Internal messaging: Government organisations are the most prolific users at 71%, which is significantly more than Education and Healthcare at 54% each
  • Internal audio calls: Government organisations are also the most prolific users at 76% versus Education (45%) and Healthcare (50%)
  • External audio calls: once again, Government organisations are the most prolific users at 51% versus Education and Healthcare at 41% each.
  • External messaging: used about the same rate by all organisations at 34% - 36%
  • Contact centre: very few organisations indicated they use Contact Centre with Microsoft Teams
  • Switchboard: The least used capability with 10% - 15% of organisations indicating they use this capability with Teams

How is Microsoft Teams used in your organisation today?

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Unfortunately, public sector organisations had to deploy Microsoft Teams into a communications environment that was composed of multiple applications. Fifty-five percent of respondents indicated their organisation has more communication applications today than pre-pandemic. Organisations now have an opportunity to extend Microsoft Teams functionality by integrating with a cloud communications platform to add the missing capabilities such as contact centre and switchboard.

If only it were that easy. Many public sector organisations are faced with even greater budgetary pressures, as the pandemic caused a significant reduction in revenue generation while requiring a sizeable investment in unexpected expenditures, such as contact tracing. The result is that public sector professionals are having to be creative to find funding for topics such as modernising communications. In fact, respondents indicated that costs (45%) and Limited Budgets (44%) are the top two barriers they face when attempting to upgrade or replace their current communications systems. The third barrier, compatibility with current software, is actually the first non-financial barrier. This is an example of how organisations are starting to view communications from more of an enterprise architecture perspective than as discrete projects. Based on our experience with public sector organisations, taking an enterprise architecture approach is an excellent way to ensure a solution that works today is easily extensible as new requirements are needed, while also contributing to cost improvement goals.

What are the barriers your organisation faces when replacing or upgrading the communications system?

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The past two years reminded all of us about the importance of modern communications for organisational resilience. Changes in perspective, such as taking an approach that evaluates contact centre, business phone, chat, video meetings, and APIs as a platform and not as individual projects is a great first step. This approach typically requires more stakeholders to be involved in the decision making process. For public sector organisations, the IT team is still the primary influencer, but there are several other leaders that have an opportunity to ensure their requirements are being included. When re-evaluating communication systems, respondents indicated the top five influencers are the Head of IT, Head of Communications, Head of Operations, Head of Budget/Finance and Head of Digital transformation/experience.

Overall, nine potential stakeholders were identified. All of them should be part of the process when re-evaluating communication systems. Although that’s most likely far more than when purchasing contact centre, business phone, or video meeting applications as independent projects, the result will be a communications system that can actually enable organisational-wide collaboration.

Who are the primary influencers when re-evaluating your communications system?

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Which brings us to the final decision maker. There is one expected change: the finance leader has a more important role at this stage. Outside of that change, the participants in the final decision stay about the same with the top five decision makers identified as the Head of IT, Head of Budget/Finance, Head of Communications, Head of Operations and Head of Organisation.

Who are the primary decision-makers when replacing or upgrading your communication system?

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Taking your Microsoft Teams deployment from good to great

Respondents have provided a clearer picture of where they are with their Microsoft Teams deployments. As a way to refine and extend Microsoft Teams capabilities, public sector organisations can easily integrate 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams to add enterprise-grade telephony and global PSTN connectivity while retaining Microsoft Teams as the sole collaboration interface.

Keeping Microsoft Teams as the collaboration hub means users can continue to enjoy the experience they are accustomed to when making calls, whether internally with teammates and co-workers who don't use Teams or externally with customers and partners.

Learn more about direct routing options for Microsoft Teams in this episode of OpenTalk , the communications technology show for public sector organisations. ​

No bots or plugins.

Because this is a direct routing integration, there’s no need to download bots and no client or browser plugins are required. Users benefit from the exact same user experience when making calls, either from the desktop app, the mobile app, or the browser app. This eliminates the need for any special retraining of existing Teams users, as well as any modification to onboarding programs for new users.

8x8 Contact Centre for Microsoft Teams.

To extend the capabilities of Microsoft Teams into the contact centre, 8x8 Contact Centre for Microsoft Teams is a Microsoft Teams certified solution providing a full suite of omni-channel contact centre functionality that simplifies customer engagement workflows and ignites collaboration across your organisation.

The result is one comprehensive communications solution that works seamlessly with Microsoft Teams.

Balancing the generational divide

As organisations reinvent government service delivery, patient experiences, and education delivery, public sector professionals recognise the need to also evolve their communications capabilities to support the broad spectrum of communication channel requirements coming from the different generations.

Although investments have been made to begin the modernisation of communications and empower everyone in the organisation to participate in supporting the customer experience, 60% of organisations still have multiple communication apps, 47% still find current communication systems do not enable them to provide an excellent experience, and 67% indicate enabling organisation-wide collaboration would improve their ability to enhance the customer experience.

Additionally public sector organisations have deployed Microsoft Teams to empower staff with tools to stay connected while working remotely, more capabilities are required to complete the modernisation of their communications solution. By combining Microsoft Teams with a modern cloud communications platform, those capabilities can now be easily integrated to add enterprise-grade telephony and global PSTN connectivity while retaining Microsoft Teams as the sole collaboration interface. Additionally, 8x8 Contact Centre for Microsoft Teams is a Microsoft Teams certified solution that enables Public Sector organisations to easily add a proven suite of omni-channel contact centre functionality.

To learn more about bringing together your contact centre, voice, video conferencing and chat solution on one experience communication platform, please get in touch.