About half of all our end-users (10k) work with Microsoft Teams on a daily basis. It’s a central component of our transformation journey and key to driving increased collaboration across our organisation. With such a large userbase already familiarised with Microsoft Teams it makes very little sense for us to introduce the Alemba chat feature as a separate entity. It’s also unlikely that Alemba’s own development in this area could keep pace with Microsoft, integration would allow us to take advantage of the rapid pace of development with chat and AI whilst Alemba continue to focus on the core product.

Feature Suggestion

• Provide an easy mechanism for integrating Microsoft Teams with ASM

• Allow Microsoft Teams to act as a front-end chat client, connecting with the ASM chat queue, and available agents

• ASM to continue to manage agent availability and all other chat settings

• Self-Service Portal must have a friendly way to link to Teams chat

Notes

• Being able to set the number of parallel chat sessions an agent can handle is a must (one is not enough)

• Freeing the chat function from the Self-Service Portal should resolve the interface design constraints around single agent multi-chat

• Ideally the chat history should be saved to the ticket history without manual effort on the agents part

• CTI type integration would be a future possibility, passing through user data to ASM on chat initiation

• Alemba should consider the AI capabilities of the Azure/Teams platforms for further development of Chatbot functionality, allowing customers to initially transact without an agent, gathering basic information for logging, suggesting knowledge etc.