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In the wake of COVID-19, businesses and other organizations around the world began implementing remote work. The trend has continued into 2021, with many organizations adopting remote work to promote the wellness of their employees. With most employees working from home, collaboration and information sharing have become the need of the hour. One of the best–possible ways to provide continuous support to a remote workforce and ensure the proper functioning of your business is via collaboration platforms. Top tech leaders like Microsoft have created collaboration platforms like Microsoft Teams to help employees stay connected with their teammates and employers regardless of the distance. 

Microsoft Teams provide workspace chat, video meetings, webinars, data sharing and storage, application integration, and more, making it one of the best-bet platforms that ensure a collaborative working atmosphere and continuous employee support and boost efficiency. 

Why companies should use MS Teams?

One major obstacle in 2020 was to collaborate efficiently, enhance employee productivity and boost business ROI. Using MS Teams, the world is learning to collaborate virtually to achieve its goals. Today, Microsoft Teams is every organization's hub for teamwork, where all conversations, files, meetings, and apps are consolidated in a single shared workspace, which is accessible anywhere, at any time, and on any device. Teams provide a facelift to how businesses communicate and work in real-time, allowing them to execute projects quickly and efficiently by sharing documents, notes, and attachments. It allows organizations to integrate other employee service desks into the workspace, making it easier for employees. 

Business benefits of MS Teams

As per the statistics of Garter, around 70% of business leaders are estimated to utilize cloud office solutions by the end of 2021, and not more than 20% of organizations will still be using on-premises capabilities. Microsoft Teams has reached around 115 million daily active users (DAU), earlier this year, and collaboration tools are no longer optional but crucial for the remote workforce. 

Microsoft Teams makes remote work a reality. There's never been a better time to put collaborative workspace platforms like this to work, and there are many benefits. 

If you are an employer who hasn't integrated a collaboration platform into your overall business strategy, here are some of the top five benefits of implementing MS Teams for your company: 

• Boost collaboration
  
  Microsoft Teams facilitate smooth, better and smarter collaboration among the workforce. Being fully integrated into Office 365, Teams offers real-time chat, audio and video conferences, and attachments that help organizations easily collaborate with their employees. Employees can schedule team meetings with around 100 distributed teammates and clients in just a click away. Moreover, Teams' accessibility from any data-enabled device such as a desktop, laptop, mobile phone, or tablet makes it the perfect choice for every business.
  
  
• Increase efficiency
  
  Reliable connectivity is one of the major benefits of MS Teams. It enables employees to interact directly with clients whenever there are business emergencies. This will help employees to save time. Employees can access all essential files, apps, video and audio meetings, real-time chat Etc., from a single shared workplace which offers an efficient and easy experience to them. They can refer to the past conversation, get a document, inquire about the quick question, and much more within Teams.
  
  
• Enhanced Digital Transformation
  
  Being a complete cloud-based platform, MS Teams helps employees access information from wherever they want, on any device according to their flexibility. With the majority of employees working remotely, organizations without digital transformation strategies will face specific challenges. This is where MS Teams could help. It is the best workplace for an employer to start cultivating their move to a digital workplace.
  
  Microsoft Teams also makes information and data sharing significantly more accessible for users. Because of its robust feature set and digital capabilities, employees can work faster and smarter by cutting out time-consuming processes. Apart from this, the employer can benefit from technologies like Artificial Intelligence to enable a more competent and better workforce.
  
  
• Get Data-driven Insights
  
  The lockdown and self-isolation have forced many organizations to work from home, which has made a tension on business leaders that remote work would affect employee productivity and eventually impact their business ROI. In such cases, the employer would like to track the workforce productivity, which it could achieve with Microsoft Teams.
  
  
• Cost-effective
  
  Microsoft Teams is a cost-effective team collaboration platform with no extra expenses. If your organization already has a Microsoft 365 subscription, you don't need to pay any extra penny for Microsoft Teams. It also benefits from automatic, consistent feature upgrades and cumulative updates and security patches, avoiding the chances of outdating.
  
  Businesses can gain so many benefits by implementing Microsoft Teams in their virtual workplace. There are several ways to utilize Microsoft Teams efficiently at your company. But today, it comes to light that many organizations aren't taking full benefits of Microsoft Teams. MS Teams is a platform where you can find a range of tasks and assignments that can be completed quickly. This will prominently enhance the productivity of your remote workforce. 
  
  

Are you using Microsoft Teams to its potential while working remotely? Here are the tips to make sure you get the most from Microsoft Teams while working remotely: 

1. Meet more resourcefully
   
   The end-to-end capability of Microsoft Teams meetings helps to get rid of frustration and ineffectiveness by carrying everything you need for each meeting into a single place. When you schedule a meeting, you can leverage the chat option, document sharing, and other discussion topics. During the meeting, the host can keep everyone focused on the topic by switching on video, avoid distractions by hiding/blurring the background, and use live captions. The users can also collaborate on Office 365 documents and change ideas in real-time using the digital whiteboard.
   
   
2. Schedule online live events
   
   Teams allow users to arrange larger live meetings, webinars, schedule events and training programs. With Microsoft Teams live events, you can schedule any live meeting and provide presentations to a huge audience inside or outside your company. This will help you to ensure that all your remote employees can partake.
   
   
3. Collaborate efficiently
   
   It is essential to collaborate and work on Office documents with your teammates while working from home. Teams allow users to create Word, Excel or PowerPoint easily within Teams itself without leaving it. The user can collaborate and communicate with teammates, send notes, add suggestions and comments and forward documents. The user can schedule a live meeting where you can view, discuss and edit the document.
   
   
4. Modify notifications
   
   In Teams, the user can modify the notification preferences for the Channels by clicking on the three dots located next to the preferred Channel or Team and change the notification settings. The user can also focus on your Activity Feed, which helps the user know if someone mentions you or reacts to one of your texts.
   
   
5. Leverage apps and bots
   
   Using Apps and bots allows the user to do more in Microsoft Teams. Analyze the dashboards, tools and files your company already utilizes. In both chats and channels, the user will have all the essential information and tools he/ she required to work as effectively as possible, regardless of whoever is the person you are working with. 
   
   

Integrating Teams with relevant and proper tools, ie, AI-powered service desks, allows the workforce to ask for more requests and queries and receive instant services efficiently within MS Team. 

Relevance of AI-powered Collaborative Platforms

In a traditional workplace, employees have to rely on diverse platforms to communicate with their teammates. Enabling artificial intelligence technology into collaborative platforms will boost employee efficiency, save time, improve business productivity, and increase profitability. 

McKinsey reports state that workforces will spend almost 1.8 hours a day and 9.8 hours per week to collect the correct information. 

AI-powered features like conversational chatbots and virtual assistants integrated within collaborative platforms like MS Teams will automate employees' daily tasks by integrating all dispersed information with intelligent knowledge management. This will enable employees to get the correct data at the right time to the right individual. 

Bring Your Employee Service Desk Within MS Teams

Microsoft Teams was one of the true winners of the global pandemic period. Since 2020, most companies have started to adopt Teams to provide flexible and supportive services that guarantee business continuity, resulting in a considerable upsurge of 95 million users in 2020. 

In this pandemic period, employees may encounter too many queries and simple issues that could rectify in seconds. They prefer instant support services for their queries from the HR agents, which will help to avoid delays in their work. An automated employee service desk integrated within Teams simplifies the agents' tasks by resolving these repetitive, multiple issues within 15 seconds without causing any difficulties to the employees. This will allow both employees and HR agents to work more efficiently. 

Though AI-powered employee service desks within MS Teams will resolve a large portion of employee tickets, the employees can also gain live experts' assistance. 

An employee service desk within MS Teams will enhance employee productivity and boost business profitability in various ways such as: 

• Allow the workforce to reply to the comments on tickets, approval requests, and changes with actionable notifications within Microsoft Teams.
  
  
• Employees can find their pending tasks, check the status of the query tickets and obtain business communications.
  
  
• Agents will have the ability to schedule a live chat within Teams with an employee from a ticket.
  
  

Checkout this blog to know about ten must-haves for Microsoft Teams-based service desks.

Benefits of Chatbots in Microsoft Teams

The modern employee service desk automates employee support by leveraging AI-powered conversational chatbots that collaborate and communicate with employees and provide an instant customized solution. Conversational chatbots are highly flexible and can handle simple instructions, ai-enabled, and natural language processing. 

Chatbots have so many benefits that are not limited to: 

• Chatbots within MS Teams will improve the productivity of your company.
  
  
• Fast access: Chatbot is readily accessible
  
  
• User-friendly: Based on natural language, chatbots are easy and user-friendly. The user has to chat in your natural language, and the chatbots will do the rest.
  
  
• Teams' chatbots have a rich interface such as images, videos, audio, texts etc., that provide a robust experience to the employees.
  
  

Conclusion

Rezolve.ai is an AI-powered employee service desk & help desk software within MS Teams that offers a full-fledged solution to automating the entire employee support through MS Teams. This will help businesses to combine efficient collaboration and contextual ticketing to boost employee experiences. 

Rezolve.ai ensures: 

• Quick, easy and instant employee support service
  
  
• Automated workflow
  
  
• Allow Teams to turn into the new "portal" for internal service and tools
  
  
• Allow service agents to handle and update tasks within Teams
  
  
• Provide fast learning and training within Teams