As Microsoft has continued to expand Teams Phone features, companies are often using it to manage inbound calls, in effect utilizing Teams Phone as a lightweight call center. At the same time, many organizations are looking to leverage the benefits of integrating their calling and contact center infrastructure so agents can better communicate and collaborate with back-office employees and to streamline PSTN access management.
With this in mind, Metrigy recently conducted a study of nearly 200 organizations currently using Teams to examine three things:
-
use cases for Teams Phone for inbound call management
-
approaches for integrating Teams into third-party contact centers
-
and how companies handle PSTN access management.
We identified different approaches based on participants’ realized benefits of using Teams in terms of cost savings, productivity improvements, and revenue gain to determine which strategies best correlated with success. Within our data set, almost 32% of respondents were currently using Teams Phone, with another 25% planning to deploy it this year. More than 91% of respondents had a dedicated contact center.
Is Teams Phone Good Enough for Inbound Call Management?
Within our participant pool, about 57% said that Teams Phone’s native features such as auto attendant/IVR, call groups, and call queues were good enough for inbound call management for group or internal call center scenarios. IT help desk was the most often cited use case for Teams Phone. A whopping 89% said they would use Teams Phone for more scenarios if it had additional features such as expanded call quality analytics and workforce engagement management (WEM). Almost 37% are using the Microsoft Queues App to obtain additional management, reporting, and supervisor functionality. Queues is most often used for inbound sales management.
This data tells us that Teams Phone is good enough for some scenarios, especially voice-centric call centers or ones that can also support interaction through Teams messaging. We do not yet see companies using Teams Phone for customer inbound calling; companies still prefer a dedicated contact center platform that offers extensive management, analytics, supervisor features, and AI capabilities such as sentiment analysis.
Integrating Teams with the Contact Center
We found that currently 44% of participants integrate Teams into their contact center to allow agents to message with each other, with supervisors, and with back-office resources to address customer inquiries. Among our success group consisting of those with above average ROI for their Teams investment, almost 63% have already completed integration, showing a strong correlation between integration and success. Participants are heavily inclined to purchase contact center platforms that have achieved Teams certification or that are currently in the certification process. Participants also have a slight preference for the Unify integration model announced in March of this year that allows contact center providers to access Teams calling features directly within the Azure cloud. However our success group is more likely to use the basic Connect model that only provides SIP trunking between Teams and the contact center platform (See this list of certified third-party contact center providers and details on the various integration models).
Simplifying PSTN Connectivity
Those using Teams Phone and a third-party contact center can potentially save money and streamline PSTN management by integrating both services onto a common calling infrastructure, either through a single provider or via the use of session border controllers to manage dialplans and call routing policy. Today, only 52% of participants have unified Teams Phone and contact center PSTN architectures, though that number is slightly higher (54%) among our success group.
What’s the Best Strategy?
The best strategy will certainly vary among organizations, but Metrigy’s research indicates success correlates with leveraging Teams Phone for lightweight voice-centric call centers, using the Queues app when additional features are required, and integrating Teams into third-party call centers to simplify communications, collaboration, and PSTN management.
———–
About Metrigy: Metrigy is an innovative research and advisory firm focusing on the rapidly changing areas of workplace collaboration, digital workplace, digital transformation, customer experience and employee experience—along with several related technologies. Metrigy delivers strategic guidance and informative content, backed by primary research metrics and analysis, for technology providers and enterprise organizations