The 5 Benefits of Microsoft Teams Phone Operator Connect

You work for a medium-to-large-size company (with hundreds to thousands of employees) and the company is in the market for a new phone system. You’re considering Teams Phone System, and you’ve heard about Operator Connect. What are the benefits?
In this video, I cover 5 benefits of Microsoft Teams Phone Operator Connect for your company.

Want my recommendations on the best Operator Connect providers? Ask me today.

About Me

Mike Smith has been helping companies select the best telecom, WAN, security, and cloud services since 1999. He founded AeroCom in 2003, and has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in tech-heavy Orange County, CA. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

You work for a medium to large sized company that is in the market for a new phone system, and one of the phone systems that your company is considering is Microsoft Teams phone system. And you may or may not have heard of this solution called Microsoft Teams Phone Operator Connect. But you’re wondering what is Operator Connect and what are the benefits of that for a company like ours? Well, my name is Mike Smith. I’m the president of. Come, let’s put our heads together on this. I’m going to give you the main five benefits of Microsoft Teams. Phone operator connect.

My Recommendations

But if you want a quick shortcut and you want to know, hey, which operator connect vendors should our medium to large size company be quoting? Well, if your company has, I’d say 50 or more users reach out, send me an email or give me a call (714.593.0011). That’s my specialty is medium to large size organizations. I’m a broker for all the major operator Connect vendors in the marketplace, and I’ve been doing this for over 25 years. So based on your company’s requirements, I can save you a lot of time by telling you which vendors you should be quoting and why, which vendors you should avoid all that good stuff and it doesn’t cost your company anything to use me for advice, so there’s no excuse not to at least reach out and see what I have to say. So send me an email. Give me a call if you’d like a shortcut. Also watch the video too. That’d be great, also subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss any of my weekly videos that I put out. I put one out every single week. Leave some comments down below. I’d love to hear from you and go check out our website at inc.com where you can read or write reviews on providers, watch videos on providers, filter them by features, all kinds of cool stuff.

Operator Connect for medium-large size companies

All right. So let’s talk operator connect for medium to large size companies. Well why am I saying medium to large size companies. Well, that’s because that’s what I deal with for the most part. That’s where my expertise is. If you want to know about Microsoft Teams, phone for small organizations, Operator Connect probably isn’t the best fit for small organizations. I’m talking like ten users, five users, things like that. But and overall, that’s just not my area of expertise. So that’s why I’m talking about medium to large size companies. All right. Now

What is Operator Connect?

what is Microsoft Teams phone operator connect. Well simply put it is a calling plan for Microsoft Teams phone. If you’ve watched any of my other videos on teams phone pricing and teams phone in general, you’ll know that there are two aspects to teams phone pricing. There’s licensing pricing that you have to pay to Microsoft for the proper licensing for teams phone. And then there’s calling plans. You’ve got to get a calling plan for every single user. Well, that’s where Operator Connect comes in. It’s a calling plan for teams phone system for medium to large sized companies.

So what are the benefits to a medium to large size company to use? Operator connect for your calling plan instead of doing something like getting your calling plans from directly from Microsoft in a in a bundle.

1. Nothing on-prem to troubleshoot

First is there’s nothing on prem to to troubleshoot. It’s a cloud based calling plan. So you’re getting all of your dial tone and phone numbers from a cloud vendor. So there’s nothing on prem. You’re not having to deploy an SBC on site, which you would have to do with some of the calling plans out there. So it’s just easier for the IT department to support, and it’s more fail proof. There’s nothing on site to fail to go wrong, to kill all the phone service for the company.

2. Better implementation support

The second benefit of Microsoft Teams phone operator connect is better implementation support. if you’re a medium to large size, company implementation is obviously a big deal. You know, there’s hundreds or thousands of employees out there, a lot of different sites. And you’re thinking, how are we going to deploy this? Maybe you have an on prem Cisco phone system everywhere. Maybe your company has all types of different phone systems out there and different service providers for dial tone, for price, for SIP trunks, analog lines everywhere. Right. Well, that can make for a complicated implementation. Now, thinking about doing that all by yourself when you’re not really that familiar with teams phone system can be pretty daunting. But with teams, phone operator connect, they can assign your company a project manager who can help you install the whole thing. Who’s been doing the installs for this for years? Who knows? Teams phone inside and out can help you do a phased implementation, like you’re doing one region at a time, or a cluster of locations at a time, or clusters of users at a time, or maybe an implementation over a several year period as contracts expire with different telecom carriers or at different sites. So much better implementation support with operator connect, as opposed to going directly to Microsoft and trying to do it on your own.

3. Better long-term support

The third benefit of Operator Connect is it’s also better long term customer support for you. We all know that if you buy from Microsoft directly, Microsoft’s Forte is not live customer support. That’s not what they aim to do when it comes to teams phone. They’d rather redirect you to online. You know, information like documents online. You can review things like that. But when it comes to phone systems, companies just aren’t used to that. They aren’t used to do it yourself support, especially for a medium to large sized company. If you guys have a problem, you need to be able to call support 24 over seven 365 days a year as many times as you need, and that’s what operators connect. Vendors offer more the traditional support that companies are used to, not the Microsoft support model of sending me an email, get a response back in a day or two type of thing. If you guys phone system is down at one of the sites, you need 24 seven Live Support and Operator Connect vendors offer that.

4. Added Features

The fourth benefit of teams phone Operator Connect is you actually get better features because Microsoft Teams phone inherently has some feature gaps. If you’ve watched my other videos, you know that. So because of those feature gaps, teams phone operator Connect vendors can come in and they offer bolt on additional features that you can add to teams phone as bowl tans, that kind of cover and fill in some of those feature gaps. Some of those include redundancy like failover options, also MMS  and SMS teams phone now offers SMS, but they don’t offer mass, so that’s something they can add on. Analog is another thing they can add on. Teams does not typically like any analog devices on their network, but an operator vendors have no problem with that. So they can help you with analog devices such as fax machines, overhead paging systems, just RJ 11 phones that are sitting out there that you don’t want to rewire right now. So that’s something they can add on. Analytics is a big one. Teams phone does not have the best analytics packages offerings inherently, just natively, but teams to an operator connect vendors through their online portals can give you all types of analytics so they can fill that gap for you. Call recording is a big one if you want.

Features

 Always on call recording teams phone does not offer that natively, but operator connect vendors do. Piggybacking off of that compliance call, recording teams phone doesn’t offer call recording, let alone compliance call recording. But these third party teams phone operator connect vendors for that on a per user basis. And another final example is direct peering with contact center service providers. So if your company has a contact center service provider like you’re using Genesis or five nine or nice one or Talk desk or one of those operator a lot of times have direct peering with those vendors so that you can transfer calls back and forth between your contact center software and your team’s phone system users without incurring long distance charges. just overall, you can see presence back and forth. A lot of integrations offered there, so a lot better option if you have a contact center.

5. Pricing

And the last major benefit that I want to cover today is pricing. Using an Operator Connect vendor for your team’s phone system calling plan, especially if you’re a medium to large size organization, is going to be less expensive. Then buying your calling plan from Microsoft directly. So if you’re getting an operator connect vendor, and again, if you have hundreds or thousands of employees, watch my videos on pricing for teams, phone system operator Connect. But I can tell you that your pricing is probably going to be somewhere between 2 to $4 per month per user. For operator Connect’s calling plan, as opposed to going directly to Microsoft, is going to be double that or more. So definitely advantage there in pricing. So no no no no. It’s kind of like the nail in the coffin. Like, hey, at the end of the day there’s a lot of benefits. And then on top of everything else it’s less expensive. So it’s really a no brainer for a medium to large size company.

Which Operator Connect Vendor should your company quote?

Hey, if you have more questions about Operator Connect or if you want to know which Operator connect vendors your company should be quoting. It’s a great question because there’s over 100 of them out there. some of them that have a bad reputation. Some have a great reputation. If you want to know which ones are the best fit for your organization reach out, send me an email or give me a call (714.593.0011). I’ll be happy to help you. I’ve been doing this for over 25 years. I’m a broker for all the major vendors out there. I’ve helped hundreds of organizations like yours. Great Operator Connect, vendors that are very happy to this day, and I can tell you what my customers have liked, which ones they’ve had a lot of success with. Based on your company’s requirements, I can match you up with the best vendors. I can introduce you to the best salespeople to work with. I can oversee the courting process to make sure your company gets the best pricing on your vendor of choice. And on top of all that, your company doesn’t have to pay me anything. I don’t charge you for my broker services because the service providers, the operator connect service providers pay me my broker fee, so there’s no excuse not to at least reach out and get my opinion on this stuff. So send me an email, give me a call. I’d love to help you. It’s the reason why I do these videos.