With the introduction of a payment system inside Microsoft Teams, small businesses will be able to charge for appointments, classes, one-on-one meetings, webinars, and much more. Tutors, instructors, financial advisors, lawyers and other small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) users in the US and Canada will soon be able to charge for virtual meetings thanks to the ability of Teams business users to take payments during a virtual meeting.
Owing to the pandemic, several platforms for virtual meetings have recorded significant growth and expansion in how services are provided online in the past few years. Brenna Robinson, general manager of Microsoft 365 small and medium businesses, in an interview, claims that “the pandemic changed the game.” Robinson explains that “I believe a lot of SMBs have changed their business models and are no longer just corner stores.”
Microsoft is already taking advantage of this tech expertise and small business demand to provide a new payments app within Teams. It is created to allow businesses to host webinars or one-on-one meetings and take charge of them. This functionality has been made available thanks to a collaboration between Microsoft and GoDaddy,PayPal, and Stripe. Teams business users can use it for free.
Before now, users might likely have had an in-person discussion with their accountant before having classes in person, but Teams is now making it simpler than ever for small businesses to conduct business virtually. Robinson says, “I’m not sure I’ll ever meet my accountant in person again.” We’ve discovered that perhaps we didn’t have to be present for all of these things, we learned.
Customers have the opportunity to pay at any time during a meeting using the Microsoft Teams payments app, which can track money received or anything outstanding throughout the meeting. Integrations with Stripe and PayPal are both accessible right now as part of a public preview, and GoDaddy payments will be introduced soon.
There is a lot of opportunity for small businesses to use this system for online lectures, exclusive networking events, and more because it supports webinars and has a huge number of attendees. And I can see a future subscriptions option here for the smaller one-on-one sessions, allowing you to quickly sign up for a class and pay through Teams.“Right now it’s more one-off,” says Robinson. “I think we’re interested in this space… I’d say this is the first step of many thinking about how SMBs engage with their customers.”
Users can download and set up the Microsoft Teams payments app from Microsoft’s business AppSource store right away. It is currently available in public preview.
Olagoke Ajibola is a creative writer and content producer with an eye for details and excellence. He has a demonstrated history of telling stories for TV, Film and Online. Aside from being fascinated by the power of imagination, his other interest are travel, sport, reading and meeting people.
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