Does Microsoft Teams Phone have Call Center Features

Your company is in the market for a new phone system and you’re looking into Microsoft Teams Phone, but you’re not sure if Teams has call center features.

In this video, I’ll explain the call center features Teams Phone has, and the features it lacks.

Want my recommendations on the best Teams Phone calling plan providers? Click the button below and 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

a few days ago and IT department reached out to me for my help. It’s a very common situation, so I wanted to run this by you. They had about 500 phone system users and about 50 of those were call center agents and they currently had a Cisco phone system and it is just a call manager phone system. And they were using Cisco Finesse, which is Cisco’s version of call center software that was combined with that Cisco phone system. And they wanted to get my advice on moving to teams phone system and which providers they should use for operator connect for teams phone system. And they wanted to take those call center agents, those 50 call center agents, and move them over to teams phone system ideally  And they wanted to know does teams phone system have the ability to do call centers. So I get this question a lot. I get the same scenario a lot, especially with Cisco phone systems. So, you know, there’s Cisco phone systems, aging and they have call center and phone system both combined on the same solution and they’re moving off of it. So they need solutions for both phone system and call center and they’re interested in teams phone system. So the question is does teams phone system offer call center features? And the answer is yes and no. And I will get into the specifics in this video.

Contact me for my recommendations

But first, really quick, if you’d like my recommendation is like this company did on the best teams phone system and call center vendors to quote for your organization, especially if you have around 50 phones system users or more. That’s really my area of expertise. Give me a call (714.593.0011) or send me an email. I will help you make a lot better decision in a fraction of the time. Also, don’t forget to check out our website arrow coming tor.com. You can browse vendors by for phone systems. You can browse phone system vendors by feature, by capability like teams, integration, all that kind of cool stuff.

Go check it out Aerocominc.com. And as always, don’t forget to leave a comment. Subscribe to the channel and like the video ring the bell all that good stuff, that type of stuff YouTube loves and it helps our videos get out to more people, so I’d really appreciate it.

Does Teams Phone have Call Center Features?

Okay, so does team’s phone system have call center features? Well, they do have a little bit of call center features, but they don’t have a full blown call center software application. So let me explain a little bit. So they do have the ability to have call center agents, log in and log out of a queue or what they call a queue. So there is log in to log out functionality and they call it a queue, but it’s not really a queue. It’s more like what I would consider are a hunt group or a call group that allows things like simultaneous ring or round robin calling or sequential order. So if somebody calls in, all phones can ring at once or it rings people in a specific order that you specify or it just selects random people to be able to answer the phone.

Teams has basic reporting

 So it can do those things, but also do have some basic call reporting for teams phone system. But it’s just very basic. It’s not customizable unless you do it through power. BI So in order to customize a team’s phone report, you’re going to have to go in to Power BI and create that custom report so you can’t give, say, a manager within your company the ability to just customize a report. They feel like pulling on a whim. It’s got to be done in advance. It’s got to be customized and built in. That’s a report that they can view. So not really good reporting. And the reporting is only historical. It’s not real time. So what that means to you is you can’t pull things like real time reports on how many people are sitting in the queue, how many people are, or how long they’ve been on hold currently and stuff like that.

What Teams Phone lacks in Call Center Features 1-6

So with that being said, I think it’s important to really cover the call center features that teams phone cannot do.

So first would be what I just mentioned, Real time reporting and analytics teams does not have the ability to give you real time reports on your call queue. Like how many people are sitting in queue right now. Have they exceeded a certain threshold that we want to have that type of stuff?

They also don’t have deep analytics within teams phone things like abandoned rate or, you know, analytics on hey, where are companies calling from and that type of thing or custom call reports like we talked about something teams phone does not have.

Also is omni channel the ability to add multiple channels of communication into the call center software for instance, website chat, email, SMS, text, social media like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, things like that. They don’t have omni channel capability within teams phone system.

They also don’t have the ability to do barge whisper for training. So if you want to have supervisors listening in to calls and possibly barge into that call and take over the call, they don’t have that ability.

What Teams Phone lacks in Call Center Features 7-12

Teams phone also does not have AI within teams phone. Now they do have copilot which I’m going to do video on that in the next month or so but it’s not for teams phone system copilot only works with conferencing right now and some outside call center service providers are using copilot as their AI. But teams phone itself does not have AI as as we speak.

They also don’t haveIVR with data dips. For instance, if you want a customer to call in and check their account balance or status update on their order, they do not have the ability to do data dips within the auto attendant.

They also don’t have something called IVA. which is like a live bot. It’s an intelligent virtual agent. They don’t have that right now.

They don’t have cued callback. So if customers want to call in and there’s a long wait time, they don’t have the ability to enter their phone number and save their place in line and have your company call them back.

Teams phone also does not have the ability to do wall boards for your company. So if you want to have a big wallboard up in your call center and display the calls that are taking place right now, they don’t have that ability, which makes sense because they can’t do real time reporting.

And lastly, another big feature they don’t have is QM or Q Air quality management or quality assurance, which is the ability to score calls and tell you customer sentiment on calls and just really analyze the level of quality that are that is taking place on the calls that are coming in to the to the call center.

Summary

So those are the biggest features that they’re missing when it comes to contact center. And that gives you a little bit of an idea of of teams phone. It has a call center. It has some basic call center, but it’s not really call center. It’s more just home groups or call groups, even though they’re calling it a call queue. It’s not really call center.  But if you want to use teams phone system and have call center software, what I can do is I can recommend certain service providers that do call center or contact center software that integrate really well with teams phone system.

So that’s what I do for the customer, for like for instance, customers that call me with the scenario that I mentioned in the very beginning of the video for those customers, I recommend, hey, for teams phone, here’s the best vendors to quote in for Contact Center that integrates with teams, here’s the best vendors to quote and kind of combine them together.

Still confused? Reach out and contact me

So if you need my advice for that stuff, absolutely. Give me a call. Send me an email. I’m happy to help you. I’ve been a broker for over 20 years in this industry, so I know the industry inside and out. And based on your company specific requirements, I can pair you up with the exact vendors you should be quoting vendors that have a really good reputation vendors that I recommend that my customers really like. I will pair you up with them. I’ll introduce you to the best salespeople to work with at those companies. Also oversee the coating process to make sure you get the best pricing from your vendor of choice. Just overall help you make a lot better decision in a fraction of the time. And hey, the nice thing is, on top of all that, I won’t pay you or I won’t. I won’t pay you, but I won’t charge you a dime for my services, for my broker fee. The service providers themselves pay me my broker fee so I don’t have to charge my customers anything. So there’s no excuse not to at least reach out, give me a call (714.593.0011) or send me an email, see what I might have to say.

I might give you some suggestions you hadn’t thought about, so definitely reach out. It’s a nice way to say thank you as well. If you got something from this video, it’s why I do the videos, so give me a call. I’d love to help you.

Check out our custom-built search engine

Also, again, don’t forget to take a look at our website arrow come income. You can search providers and filter them by feature. And as always, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. Leave a comment. Tell me what you think about the video. Tell me if it helped you. Tell me a suggestion of something you’d like to see me do a video on in the future. All that good stuff. I’d really appreciate it.

All right. Well, thanks for watching. Have a great day and I’ll catch you on the next one.