Although working from home has been your team’s reality for a while now, you may still be discovering kinks in your workflow as you’ve had to rely solely on apps to collaborate and communicate. Here’s a common one: you chat, talk, video and screen share with your team all day in Microsoft Teams, and then you have to switch platforms – using your phone system to make and take calls from your customers and suppliers.

Right now, this sounds like a minor concern in an overall tense time, but it’s actually a productivity problem that can add up to a lot of wasted time and money – both of which are in dwindling supply as you seek to do more with less during the current crisis. We don’t have a date for when we’ll get back to an open business environment, but even if we did, fixing issues like this can benefit your organization however you choose to work going forward.

How can you unify internal and external collaboration?

This particular problem of using separate platforms for internal and external collaboration is easily solved by integrating Microsoft Teams with your business phone system. With a now 100 percent remote workforce, that means integrating with a cloud-based PBX like the Broadvoice b-hive unified communications platform. Broadvoice for Microsoft Teams allows you to do just that, unifying calls, messaging and collaboration in one interface. With Broadvoice for Microsoft Teams, you can use the Microsoft Teams app on your desktop or mobile device to:

• Dial an external contact using your b-hive number
• Answer, hold or transfer calls to your b-hive number

But it does a lot more than simply enable outbound and inbound calls to the public telephone network. Broadvoice for Microsoft Teams also lets you:

• Access reports on placed, received and missed calls
• Click to call an internal teammate from chat or the internal directory
• Create or preserve your auto attendant and call routing plans
• Leverage call center features, such as hunt groups and CRM integration
• Use virtual faxing

Isn’t integrating platforms a lot of work and expensive, too?

While these integrated capabilities can have a huge impact, they’re not difficult or costly to implement. You can deploy Broadvoice for Microsoft Teams to your entire organization in a few hours.

• Like b-hive itself, Broadvoice for Microsoft Teams is a cloud-based subscription service.
• There’s no hardware or software required.
• After licensing Broadvoice for Microsoft Teams, your Office 365 administrator simply enables it for users as needed.
• You can test Broadvoice for Microsoft Teams free for 30 days with 25 users.
• If you like it, you pay a low monthly fee per user.

Is Broadvoice for Microsoft Teams a fit for your company?

Broadvoice b-hive is designed to bring enterprise-class calling functionality, including call center features, to small and medium businesses as well as mid-market enterprises. Here’s how it can help you depending on what you’ve got now.

•  Already using Teams? If you’re already using Teams for collaboration, Broadvoice for Microsoft Teams will help you better leverage Teams for your remote workforce. Rather than connect an aging PBX, which doesn’t support home-based workers, you can migrate to b-hive cloud PBX, which gives you greater capabilities, including call center functionality, on a subscription basis with no capex.
• Already using b-hive? If you’re already using b-hive, you’re set up for anywhere communications, but you may be looking for a collaborative workspace that includes your remote and at-home workers. Microsoft Teams is an attractive choice. It’s available in free and paid versions, but Microsoft has made paid Teams available free for six months starting March 10. Broadvoice for Microsoft Teams will amplify the benefit of Teams with b-hive integration.

If you’re new to either or both platforms, we’re happy to help you get set up and integrate them so that your everywhere workforce works better anywhere.