Microsoft Teams provides opportunities for independent software vendors (ISVs) to deliver enhanced customer value by either creating new collaborative user experiences or enhancing existing ones. By delivering these experiences where users are in the flow of work inside Teams, ISVs can drive more stickiness for their apps, resulting in higher renewal rates, as discussed in another recent blog post. Let’s explore how several ISVs built and deployed their apps on Teams to improve usage and customer retention.
ISV partners can build unique and collaborative experiences in Microsoft Teams to improve user counts
BHN Rewards is an innovative rewards application that enables employees to give rewards and recognition within meetings in Microsoft Teams. With a few clicks, users can now celebrate endless milestones and achievements, from work anniversaries to project launches—all inside their daily digital workspace in Teams. This ease-of-use not only equips customers to adapt to the hybrid and highly distributed future of work, but it also drives employee engagement and boosts morale, loyalty, and productivity.
With an aim to transform how meetings are run, Slido created a high-quality audience interaction app, which gives everyone in meetings a voice by engaging them with polls, surveys, quizzes, and Q&As. Slido has achieved 200% growth in monthly active users (MAU) for its application on Teams. By increasing user numbers within accounts, ISVs often have more success with customer retention and can increase the number of licenses during contract renewals.
ISV partners can produce better customer outcomes and boost usage by enabling in-context collaboration on Teams
Freshworks has been providing IT service management (ITSM) solutions to businesses through its cloud-based IT service desk, Freshservice. With the onset of the pandemic, providing unified and robust IT support in a hybrid workplace became even more challenging, and organizations were looking for more channels through which employees could receive ITSM support in a faster and simpler way. Freshworks enabled customers on Teams to streamline internal support and improve agent productivity through the AI-powered ServiceBot app. ServiceBot on Teams facilitates agent collaboration, conversational support for end users, and accelerated incident resolution. ServiceBot has experienced significant MAU growth in just 10 months; the application also increased employee access to help desk systems, resulting in a 40% ticket increase while decreasing the average response and resolution time.
Backed by more than 20 years of experience, Colombia-based Aranda Software offers disruptive solutions for ITSM that help customers enhance productivity. The company has achieved strong growth by integrating the Aranda Virtual Agent into Teams, which allows users to create new tickets, follow up on them, approve specific requests based on business logic, and search articles for self-service answers in the knowledge base, all within the flow of work. This helps reduce response times and costs while also boosting productivity.
HiBob is an HR platform that enables companies to manage time, talent, performance, and culture efficiently. The company realized that Teams was the ideal platform to continue growing its business and deployed the bob HR app to make key HR actions accessible within employees’ flow of work. During the initial days of the pandemic, many HR operations and employee actions were in silos and manually tracked. The lack of centralization and digitalization was making it difficult for companies to ensure productivity with a hybrid work model. Bob HR was integrated into Teams to empower employees to perform HR tasks with ease, inspire productivity, and improve collaboration and employee engagement. The app has not only seen 100% growth in MAU, but it also drove sticky usage patterns by creating relevant user experiences and enabled customers to save 80 to 100 hours of admin work every month.
These are just a few examples of ISVs that have built and deployed apps on Teams to deliver more value for customers and improve retention. Learn more about how you can build collaborative apps and help grow your business with Teams.
