Symity’s customised, specialised approach
Symity’s User Adoption team takes great pride in carrying out one-to-one interviews to gather requirements, holding small-scale training sessions when feasible, and assisting with on-site support on go-live day.
On very large projects, this is often just not feasible. When you need to deliver Microsoft Teams Phone deployments at scale, a different approach is needed.
On a recent deployment of Microsoft Teams Phone to a customer with over 100,000 staff, Symity helped deploy nearly 1,000 Microsoft Teams Call Queues across over 800 locations.
So how did we do it?
Asking for a list of members of each Call Queue would have significantly increased the amount of data, which would need to be gathered. In all likelihood, some incorrect data would have been provided, which would then have required clarification. And in between gathering the data and going live with the Call Queue, no doubt various changes would have been needed.
We proposed to the customer to deploy all Call Queues as Teams Calling Enabled Channels, allowing Team Owners to add and remove members themselves.
Whilst it was at the time a very new feature to Teams, and a few small issues had to be ironed out along the way, it worked very well.
Recently, Microsoft have released the ability for users to change greetings and voicemail messages for Call Queues (which would have been useful during our deployment if it had been available), and the customer is piloting this prior to release.
Commoditised Solutions
Microsoft Teams Call Queues can provide some sophisticated call routing features. – All of this means asking lots of questions, though, (and potentially, receiving lots of questions in return). – On this scale, we didn’t have the luxury to do that. So the project team agreed to deploy Call Queues with just a few simple (and easy to explain) options, minimising data gathering.
For each Call Queue, we just needed to know:
- Email addresses of three Owners who can make changes to the Call Queue.
- Suggested Call Queue Name (project team then make the name based on this, and other data such as the site name).
- Routing method – all agents ring at once, or in turn.
- Timeout option – what do you want to do if no-one answers? Do nothing, go to voicemail, or divert elsewhere? If voicemail, please provide a message (which was then used for the Call Queue text-to-speech engine, avoiding the need to record messages and send files around). If divert, please provide destination.
Easy-to-follow User Guides
Symity wrote comprehensive but easy-to-follow user guides, which the customer then hosted on their Intranet. A simple ‘How to use a Call Queue’ with basic information was targeted at end-users, and a more in-depth ‘Understanding Call Queues’ guide for Call Queue owners, explaining some of the options.
Simple Deployment Workflow
In conjunction with the customer’s project team, we developed a very simple workflow:
- Customer’s Business Analyst sends simple Excel form to site contact, who returns it with appropriate information filled in or selected. The ‘Understanding Call Queues’ Intranet article is linked within the initial email communication.
- Business Analyst then adds the information for those Call Queues to a master spreadsheet.
- Customer’s Teams Engineers pull data off the spreadsheet and create Queues in batches via a script, and assign a phone number for the queue, adding this to the sheet.
- Business Analyst checks sheet on a regular basis and when a Queue is created, sends a templated email to the Team Owners to advise that their Queue has been created, advising them of the new phone number and directing them to the guidance on the Intranet.
Clearly, this simple workflow didn’t work in every single case – in some situations, the Business Analyst did end up talking to the site contact or Call Queue owners to clarify their use case or answer questions (and in one case, the team had to get a voicemail greeting recorded in Welsh – the text-to-speech engine can’t cope with that), but in the vast majority of cases, this standardised solution worked very well.
This approach was specifically developed for a very particular project and can easily be adjusted to any client’s requirement.
Symity work with customers of all sizes to develop the right approach for their particular business.
For more information and how Symity can help you, get in touch.
Paul TaylorSpecial Projects Senior Project Manager
Symity