How Businesses Can Trim the Fat from Their Budgets

Between Box, Google Drive, Slack, Zoom, Trello, Microsoft Teams and many more, your company has a whole host of workplace applications that it can use to facilitate collaboration and enhance productivity. 

But how many apps is too many? Often, we see businesses paying for multiple subscriptions when only one would suffice. 

Here’s the thing, most of today’s application providers have overlapping functionality – and the behemoth of them all is Microsoft Teams. 

With storage capabilities, chat, video calls, a planner and integrated office 365, Microsoft Teams could easily become your one stop shop application. 

If you’re paying multiple subscriptions for Slack and Zoom on top of Microsoft Teams, you may want to reconsider. Doing so could save you hundreds – even thousands – of dollars per month, depending on how many users there are in your business. 

In fact, consolidating your applications is one of the easiest ways to improve the bottom line. 

Why Microsoft Teams is the way to go

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration app that’s designed for the modern workplace. It helps your employees to stay connected – no matter where they are. But beyond communication, Microsoft Teams also seamlessly integrated with the wider Office 365 suite of tools. 

By harnessing the power of the cloud, Microsoft Teams enables your employees to collaborate on documents in real-time. It also allows your teams to store their data in the cloud, so that it can be accessed from anywhere, on any device – as long as they have an internet connection. 

As you can see, Microsoft Team’s capabilities overlap with that of Zoom, Slack, Box and Google Drive. With one application, your people can do everything – and at a fraction of the price! 

Other benefits to reducing the number of business apps you use 

And that’s just the direct costs associated with reducing the number of subscriptions you pay for. There’s also a host of indirect benefits that come from cutting down on the number of apps you use, including: 

• Improved collaboration: Teams makes it easy for your employees to collaborate, no matter where they are. Microsoft estimates that businesses save more than $14.3 million over three years due to enhanced productivity and collaboration. 
• Less time is spent switching between applications: Switching between different applications, remembering what data  is saved where and which platform a chat is on steals time away from your employees. In fact, the time employees spend toggling back and forth between apps adds up to 32 days a year. Having everything available in one place within an intuitive interface means your people can be more efficient.
• Cut the cord!: With Teams in place, your business can cut the cord and stop relying on traditional telephone solutions. This, again, can save you a lot of money in the long run. 
• Reduce complexity: If your employees are constantly moving from application to application, it makes their daily workflow more complex. Nearly seven in 10 workers say they toggle between apps up to 10 times per hour. This can increase stress and make them less productive. On the flip side, by putting the workflow into one application, work tasks become much more simple and manageable. 
• Combat application overload: Too many apps not only wastes time, but they can leave your employees feeling frustrated. In line with this, research indicates that 52% of employees say app overload is more annoying than paying bills. By consolidating everything into one app, you can improve the employee experience. Your people will thank you for it! 

How to get started with Microsoft Teams and app consolidation

Consolidating your applications into Microsoft Teams isn’t as simple as just canceling your subscriptions. You need to make sure that you don’t lose sensitive data that’s stored on your other platforms. From a security perspective, you also need to ensure that you shut down your other applications compliantly. 

If you’re new to Teams, you may also want to consider onboarding sessions to help familiarize your people with the app and how it works. Often, we see customers using just the most basic functions of Teams – and missing out on some of its cooler features!

So, if you’d like to explore all that Microsoft Teams has to offer, get in touch with us. We can help you roll out Microsoft Teams in your business and manage your solution for you. 

Learn More About Our Managed IT Services and Microsoft Office 365 partnership 

Skyline IT Management can help your Oklahoma business with any questions about Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Teams and get you started with the plan that’s perfect for your needs.

Set up a free consultation so we can discuss your business needs, your technology pain points and what success looks like to you.

Book a Call today to schedule a technology consultation.