The Microsoft Teams integration makes it easy to manage customer feedback without needing to switch between platforms.
By bringing real-time customer feedback into your workspace, you get:
- A collaborative environment that empowers and motivates
- A birds-eye view of what customers are saying (and how your team is working together to handle issues)
- A forum to gain valuable insights into negative feedback and cheerlead a job well done
In this article, we’ll explore how the Microsoft Teams integration can help you improve customer relationships and boost team morale. We’ll also share a roadmap for how to set up the Teams integration for maximum efficiency.
Table of contents
- Why the Microsoft Teams integration helps MSPs improve customer relationships
- How to get the most from the Microsoft Teams integration
Why the Microsoft Teams integration helps MSPs improve customer relationships
Providing a great experience not only improves customer relationships, but also team morale.
When customer satisfaction is an organization-wide goal (that’s measured and held accountable), employees are incentivized to produce better results.
Happy customers make for a more positive and productive working environment. As such, a strong team culture often leads to:
- Better collaboration
- Better productivity
- Improved workflows
- Less churn (and thus a better ROI)
The Microsoft Teams integration makes it easier to achieve these powerful outcomes. Here’s exactly why (and how) it helps you drive customer loyalty and improve team morale.
Stay organized and act on feedback swiftly
Microsoft Teams is where you work and spend your time. Pulling in feedback makes it seamless and easy to stay on top of what your customers are saying (and how your team is responding) without needing to switch platforms.
During setup (more details in the next section), you’ll configure everything so that it’s organized and aligns with your ideal workflow.
Once complete, reviews will get automatically pulled into Teams in real-time. This “set it and forget it” workflow ensures you never miss a beat.
This is most critical when it comes to monitoring negative feedback. In this case, it’s key to have a strategic process in place so you can act swiftly.
We recommend this workflow (and use it ourselves here at SmileBack):
- Open an internal discussion: The agent assigned to the ticket should immediately open a discussion and explain what happened. This way, everybody gets up to speed without needing to ask.
- Escalate to a designated team member: If it’s serious or requires clarification, the agent should escalate to see what they could have done differently or better. They can also get feedback to ensure their planned response is spot on.
- Reach out to the customer within two hours: Respond no later than two hours after receiving the message, as that assures the customer you’ve received their feedback and are taking action. Get specific (e.g. tell them when you’ll follow up again, and when you expect the issue to be resolved), but don’t make promises you can’t keep.
- Create an issue: Finally, create an issue in your platform so it’s on your agenda for the next team meeting. This is a foolproof way to ensure everybody is looped in on what went wrong and learns how to avoid a future similar outcome.
Top Tip: To learn more about efficiently responding to negative feedback, read our guide on What to do with negative responses.
Engage internally to drive collaboration
Funneling reviews into your team’s workspace makes it incredibly easy to collaborate.
Superimpose a predefined workflow and rules of engagement, and collaboration reaches new levels.
For example, here’s what the “open an internal discussion” step could look like in more detail:
- A new review comes in
- The designated team member leaves a note signifying they’re taking care of it
- Other team members can chime in with advice or thoughts
- If it gets escalated, the managing team member can add expert internal insights to a difficult situation
- Everybody is watching the thread, so everybody learns in real-time
- The situation gets added to the next team meeting to discuss
- Team members learn from each other during the retrospective
When it comes to positive feedback, team members can simply comment and leave emojis to cheerlead each other on, which gets everybody excited about staying on top of things.
This brings us to our next point.
Close the loop so nothing slips through the cracks
Because everything is in one place, it’s easy to stay on top of things.
Team members and managers alike can simply scan the threads and spot signifying emojis to work out if feedback has been actioned.
If an issue is yet to be handled, whichever team member spots that can simply tag the channel to discern if the issue is truly unresolved, or if somebody simply forgot to leave an indicating emoji.
Either way, pulling feedback into Teams ensures nothing slips through the cracks, and if it does, it’s dealt with in a timely manner.
Improve your work culture
For managers, the Microsoft Teams integration provides an easily accessible forum to review feedback that’s come through in a day or week. This helps you:
- Stay up to speed on what’s going on
- Empower employees to keep doing a great job
Empowering employees is as simple as quickly reacting with an emoji to every (or a reasonable number) of threads to signify “job well done”.
This way, you’re showing your employees you’re present and aware of their hard work. This small act goes a long way and sends a message to keep it up.
Top Tip: To learn more about motivating employees to collect and act expeditiously on feedback, read our guide on How to Incentivize Your Employees to Collect Customer Feedback.
How to get the most from the Microsoft Teams integration
There are many ways to set up your Microsoft Teams integration. Following a roadmap reduces overwhelm and gets you up and running quickly.
Below are three recommended setups. You can start simple and get more advanced as needed. That said, if you only have the bandwidth for one, start here:
The simple setup
In the simple setup, you pull all feedback into one designated feedback channel.
This is the easiest option because by default the integration will share all incoming SmileBack feedback into one “feedback” channel in Teams.
As such, you can simply leave the filter option fields blank (i.e. do not customize anything):
Now, all of your feedback (positive and negative) will be in one easy to access place.
Top Tip: To learn exactly how to connect the integration, read our help desk article on how to use SmileBack with Microsoft Teams.
The more advanced setup
Here, you’ll create two channels: one for positive feedback and one for negative feedback. These filters make it easier to react to negative feedback at speed as it’s in its own organized channel.
To put positive feedback into a “Good News” channel, you’ll need to filter CSAT and NPS separately.
For CSAT, select the “Positive” option in the Rating field:
For NPS, select “Promoter (9-10)” in the “Score” field:
Now, only positive CSAT and NPS feedback will get added to the “Good News” channel.
Next, you’ll need to filter negative and neutral feedback into a “Feedback escalation” channel.
Note: Make sure team members in customer-facing roles (help desk, account management/customer success, and their managers) have access to this channel. This improves collaboration and ensures nothing gets lost in the fold.
For CSAT, select the “Neutral” and “Negative” options in the Rating field:
For NPS, select “Detractor (0-6)” and “Passive (7-8)” options in the Score field:
Once you have these two channels set up, you’ll never have to sort through one big forum to spot positive vs. negative feedback again.
This is especially useful if you receive a large amount of feedback and want to ensure every negative or neutral response gets actioned immediately.
Bonus tip for Teams pros
You can also send your positive comments with marketing permission directly to a “Testimonials” channel.
This way, the marketing team knows which pieces of feedback they are allowed to use publicly so they can easily incorporate it as social proof.
Toggle “Has a comment” and “Has marketing permissions” to the “on” position during setup.
Note: Only people leaving positive ratings can see the option to give marketing permission, so there’s no need to also filter for positive ratings in this instance.
Key takeaways
The Microsoft Teams integration boosts morale and builds a culture of people working together to solve problems and celebrate wins.
Your team will see the value in negative feedback and learn together as they help each other through difficult conversations. On the flip side, everybody will participate in lifting each other up for a job well done.
In all, your team members will be excited about feedback and staying collectively active in the channel, which ensures customers are well taken care of while your team learns and grows.
Want to talk to someone about how to set up a Microsoft Teams integration?
