Microsoft Teams bots are crucial to get the most out of your collaboration stack.

With 91% of companies now using at least 2 messaging apps, there’s a good chance you’ll want to extend the functionality of your Teams with some plugins, add-ons, and bots.

Got employees using different chat apps at the same time?

There’s a bot to sync their conversations.

Need to track employee engagement and surveys?

There’s a bot to poll your staff members.

With more bots appearing on the Microsoft Teams store all the time, here are our top 10.

1 — Mio

Do you communicate with people outside your organization?

Do they use apps other than Microsoft Teams?

If the answer is yes to both of these questions, according to research, they’ll likely be using Slack or Cisco Webex Teams.

When this is the case, it becomes extremely unproductive moving out of Teams, into your external contact’s choice of app, and starting the conversation again.

Or even worse, end up resorting to email like it’s the 90s. (Okay, email has a purpose but you get the point).

That’s why Mio has created universal channels for Microsoft Teams with Slack or Webex Teams…

You can stay in Teams and send messages to your contractors, suppliers, or clients that use Slack or Webex.

They stay in their platform too and Mio translates the messages across platform.

And it’s not just messages that are supported! GIFs, emojis, channels, DMs, and message edits/deletes are all supported.

If this sounds like something you need, add Mio to Microsoft Teams here.

You may also like: Ultimate Guide to External Federation in Teams

2. Whobot

Struggling to keep track of everyone in your organization?

Whobot, otherwise known as Who, can help with that.

With Whobot, users can search for whatever or whoever you need with nothing but a simple question.

For instance, if you need to talk to someone about product sales, you could type, “Who knows about the latest product sales numbers?”

Whobot collects data on whoever mentioned “product sales numbers” recently, and hands it to you, along with insights on how to contact your coworker, (i.e. via message or email).

To install Whobot, click on the “More Apps” option in the list that appears when you hit the three dots to the left-hand side of your Microsoft Teams app.

3. Zoom.ai

Zoom.ai is one of the most popular Microsoft Teams bots.

This handy meeting assistant makes it easier to schedule interactions with other people in your business.

With the Zoom.ai bot, you can automate your meeting schedules, reserve rooms for your colleagues, and access useful contextual information.

Zoom.ai also syncs with calendars and CRM tools so that you can collect useful information in seconds.

Whether you need to schedule a conference with your colleagues, check your calendar and team availability times, or follow up on a meeting, Zoom.ai can help.

You can even use the bot for a daily snapshot of your schedule so that you don’t double-book anything.

4. Meekan

Need help keeping your team on the same page?

Meekan is a scheduling bot for Microsoft Teams that helps you to do just that.

Created to reduce reliance on things like endless email threads, Meekan ensures that you can match everyone’s calendars and find a conference time that works.

You can say something like “@Meekan, how does lunchtime look on Friday for a meeting”, and the app will give you an insight into the schedule of everyone in your Teams channel.

This is a particularly useful Microsoft Teams bot to have around if you’re working with remote employees from different parts of the world.

The bot understands time zones (so it’s not going to get anyone up at 3 am for a conference).

Additionally, you can ask Meekan about your calendar to check whether you’re free for upcoming appointments.

5. Growbot

We all crave a little recognition from time to time, right?

One of the main reasons that employees leave their jobs today is that they feel underappreciated.

Fortunately, tools like Growbot give today’s busy managers and supervisors a fun and easy way to dole out the kudos and keep turnover to a minimum.

With Growbot, you can simply ask @Growbot to send kudos to anyone in your channel that needs a pat on the back.

Growbot helpfully stores information about the kudos that you send to your team members, so you can also track how much positive feedback each person is getting.

Growbot was one of the original launch partners to work with Microsoft Teams.

Today, it’s one of the most common add-ons for the Microsoft Teams app.

6. Workbot

Already, countless companies rely on this bot to approve workflows, deliver requests for IT assistance, and manage order fulfillment from within the Microsoft Teams environment.

For example, you can ask Workbot to create a new lead for you in Salesforce without having to click out of your Teams channel.

You’ll also have the option to look up users on Intercom, create new mail campaigns in MailChimp, and get smart notifications from Zendesk.

Want more insights into how your business is performing?

Just ask Workbot to schedule summary reports from your favorite tools and deliver them to your Teams app.

The possibilities are practically endless!

Designed by the Workato team, Workbot helps you to bring more of your daily work processes into your collaboration app.

You can pull information and functionalities from over 150 business apps at once, which means less hopping between tabs.

7. Polly

Ever feel like you need to be a mind reader to lead your team effectively?

It’s hard to know if your people are adequately engaged and well-supported in their work, particularly when you’re working with remote and dispersed employees.

If your psychic powers aren’t as great as you’d like them to be, you can always turn to Polly.

This Microsoft Teams bot allows business leaders to conduct and analyze polls or surveys in Teams.

With Polly, you can get instant responses to your most pressing questions, with votes that run in tandem to your conversations.

You’ll also have the option to manage various parts of your poll too.

For instance, you can decide whether votes should be anonymous.

You can also schedule regular polls to update what you know about your team.

There’s also a Polly tab available on Teams where you can get up-to-date overviews of conversation poll data.

8. Soapbox

Everybody talks about meetings that could have been an email.

It’s even got its own meme.

Soapbox is an agenda app for one-on-ones and team meetings. No more digging through Google Docs or emails to prepare for your meetings. Instead, build your meeting agendas in Soapbox and have all your talking points, notes and next steps in one place.

Meetings are better when everyone comes prepared and leaves aligned and ready to crush it.

Soapbox is especially great for remote teams that have asynchronous meetings. You can discuss items without ever having to be in the same room.

You can launch Soapbox in a tab at the top of a chat or channel so you can run meetings effectively without ever having to leave Teams.

Features include:

• Suggested questions to prompt better conversations
• Meeting notifications to keep you and your team accountable
• Meeting minutes to make catching up easy for people who are unable to attend
• Support for building stronger relationships between teams, helping you break down workplace silos

9. YellowAnt

YellowAnt is a leading workplace assistant bot designed to help people automate their work within Microsoft Teams.

This easy-to-use tool integrates with apps like Gmail, Salesforce, Marketo, YouTube, Wikipedia, and Freshdesk to deliver endless command and event-triggered automations within Microsoft Teams.

Take this scenario:

If you link your YellowAnt bot with Github, then ask @YellowAnt to list the issues on Github at a specific time, the service will jump into your other apps and retrieve the data for you.

This means you don’t have to spend as much time moving between different tools.

You could also ask @YellowAnt to give you information from Gmail or send a message through Gmail on your behalf.

Some of the everyday tasks you’ll be able to automate with YellowAnt include:

• Sending emails
• Commenting on Github issues
• Searching for Salesforce issues
• Creating and resolving issues on Zendesk
• Recalling information from G-Suite files

10. Statsbot

Businesses of all sizes are learning that if they want to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace, they need data — and lots of it.

Of course, for most companies, accessing that information means browsing through various applications and tools to collect useful insights.

The more apps you have to search through, the harder it is to get the stats you need.

That’s where Statsbot can help.

Statsbot pulls raw data from various points in your business environment and delivers it to you in the form of useful insights that you can access directly within Microsoft Teams.

All you need to do is set up Statsbot within your workplace, integrate it with the analytics systems you use, and then add the bot to your Microsoft Teams environment.

From there, your employees will be able to quickly ask Statsbot for information when they’re working with colleagues or responding to a customer query.

Thanks for reading! We hope you find these 10 Microsoft Teams bots useful and would love to hear your experiences once you’ve installed them @mio

Reference:

Mio. (2020). Ten must-have bots for Microsoft Teams in 2020. Available at: https://medium.com/@messageio/ten-must-have-bots-for-microsoft-teams-in-2019-e91a0cc04c8a [Accessed 8th June 2020].