How to deploy a simple contact centre in Microsoft Teams Phone System with voice enabled channels

Did you know that Microsoft Teams Phone System includes a number of call routing functions that can be used to set up a simple contact centre for your organisation?

Below, we guide you through how to successfully deploy a simple contact centre in Microsoft Teams Phone System with voice enabled channels.

In order to deploy a simple contact centre in Microsoft Teams Phone System with voice enabled channels, to begin with we must create a behaviour for an inbound call, rather than just routing straight to a user. To do this, we can use auto attendants and call queues to manipulate how the call is handled, and who it is handled by.

There are generally three components to making a simple contact centre using the native Teams Phone System functionality.

Component 1 – auto attendants

It’s in the auto attendant that we are able to configure elements such as business hours. This allows specific messages to play, and calls to be routed differently based on what time of day it is.

Within the auto attendant, options can also be provided to callers in order to help route them to the most appropriate person or team within the organisation. As well as this, menus can be configured to be ‘text to speech’ and audio files can be uploaded to enable voice recognition, allowing hands free navigation.

You can read more detailed information on configuring auto attendants here.

Component 2 – call queues

Once the call has navigated its way through the auto attendant and a destination is determined, you can use the call queue to decide on other factors, such as what music or message is played while your caller waits for someone to answer.

It can also be important to understand who is calling, so here we are able to add a manual list of users or use AD groups.

Or even better and going a step further, we could add a voice enabled Teams channel, which is touched on in a moment.

There is some useful advice on call queues which you can read here.

Component 3 – Teams enabled voice channels

By voice enabling a Teams channel, this allows you to turn said channel into a team-based call queue and gives you somewhere to direct calls from your auto attendants and call queues.

Within these voice enabled Teams channels, users have the ability to communicate with their colleagues, share information, discuss queries arising from the call queue as a team, and pick up incoming calls whilst still taking calls in the queue. This feature works well for teams such as IT or HR helpdesks where colleagues may need to work together to resolve issues.

Whilst using these three components alone is often enough to get you by with fairly basic contact centre functionality, there are some limitations around reporting. For example, we often see the need for advanced reporting within the contact centre area, or a more advanced call routing process. If you require more advanced Teams contact centre functionality, there are plenty of 3rd party Contact Centre platforms (such as Clobba, Anywhere 365, Luware etc) that can integrate with Microsoft Teams and provide additional elements.

David French

UC Architect

Symity