Law firms have weathered the pandemic well, indeed much better than many expected. It’s amazing how necessity focuses the mind and one IT director summed it up well with his observation that ‘we achieved in six weeks what it would probably have taken us six years to do normally’.
Microsoft Teams played a big part in that initial mobilisation effort and the subsequent work from home normalisation. Its collaboration capabilities kept people together and projects on track, and alongside Zoom, ushered in a new era of universal online meetings and a thousand and one viral videos!
For all of the inherent uncertainty around Covid, we do seem to be in steady state now, as in able to cope with whatever comes our way. Hybrid working seems here to stay and with it Teams as the project/meeting/messaging powerhouse.
So as we catch our breath and plan for the year ahead, what about driving additional value from our Teams investment? What about overlaying new capabilities to optimise productivity, client service and revenues while minimising cost, risk and inefficiency?
Calling is a great place to start – and the first stop has to be Call2Teams. Here’s a service that puts a PSTN calling function into a Teams environment – giving you, ta-da, Teams with telephony and enabling the positioning of Microsoft Teams as your enterprise collaboration and calling service of choice, with users having a single pane of glass. It is also the logical stepping-stone to streamlining your legacy telephony into one universal Microsoft platform; this would allow you to leverage your investment in PBX features such as call routing and hunt groups (which teams doesn’t offer) while taking advantage of Microsoft’s continuity, flexibility and inherent support for remote working.
All those calls though…tracking and recording client time spent on video or voice calls via Teams needs to be effortless, seamless and wholly accurate. Sadly, out of the box Teams doesn’t give you the capability that has long been embedded in your office phone system. There’s also the small matter of compliance and risk management and the need and/or desire to record calls at the touch of a button. Not to mention the nice-to-have convenience of being able to transcribe a call on-demand…
That’s what today’s call recording and voice AI solutions can offer – and integrating them into Teams and optimising them for your business is what specialists like Redcentric are here for. All that advisory value you provide in your online sessions? Don’t let it escape into the ether when you can capture your billable time with ease by collating and reporting on call hours, and using voice AI to automatically assign activities with account codes.
There’s comfort too in being able to capture every interaction regardless of where it is routed or to which device within your organisation. You have total control of what is recorded, what is retained and who has access to those recordings. Aside from the compliance tick, there’s something especially reassuring in being able to drill into a call, or search transcriptions by keyword, when there may be an issue or legal point to review.
There’s no doubt that Microsoft Teams has thrown many law firms a lifeline in terms of keeping it all together when we’ve all had to be apart. But there’s plenty more advantage to be had from the judicious overlaying of complementary services. Time to make the call.
