Is Teams Phone System good for mid-size companies in 2021?

October 15, 2021 Mike Smith

Is Microsoft Teams Phone System a good fit, for a mid-size company, in 2021?

You’ve heard of using Teams for your company’s PBX, but is that just something for micro-size companies? Can it handle the requirements of a substantial brick-and-mortar company with 100-5,000 employees?

In this short video (below), Mike gives you several pivotal questions to ask about your company, that will determine if Teams Phone System would fit your mid-size organization.

But what about the other questions you have? Click the button below and ask Mike today… or call him at 714.593.0011

About Mike
Mike Smith is the Founder and President of AeroCom and has been helping companies with telecom and cloud services since 1999. He has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards and in 2011, he was honored as one of the top 40 business people in Orange County, CA., under 40 years old. You can also hear him as the host of the popular Information Technology podcast, ITsmiths with Mike Smith. Follow Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter or SpiceWorks.

Transcript

Your company is around what I consider mid-sized, that means about 100 employees to maybe 5,000 employees-ish, and you’re wondering, “Hey, is Microsoft Teams Phone System a good fit for our company?”

That’s a great question, and the answer to that question, (I should say), has changed over the last couple years.

So, at first, a couple years ago I would say probably not, maybe, but nowadays, it really kind of depends.

So, first and foremost, there’s a lot that goes into this question so number one, contact me. I’ll talk about that more later in the video but first to give you a little bit of a head start, there are some main things that you want to think about when you’re trying to answer that question and I wanted to make a video to kind of give you a little bit of a head start.

Office 365 License Level

So the first thing you want to think about is your license level. So which Office 365 licensing does your company have?

For instance, if your company has E5 currently, you’re already paying for the Phone System feature and the conferencing feature. So that changes the pricing landscape of adopting Microsoft Teams Phone System a ton, because that saves you $8.00 to $12.00 per month per user, compared to other companies who are on a different license.

So that right there definitely factors into consideration, if you’re already using E5 for some reason other than the Phone System feature.

Teams Adoption

Another thing to take into consideration is what is your Microsoft Teams adoption today? I know within the last year, with the pandemic, a lot of companies have started to use Microsoft Teams a ton.

The answer to that question universally these days is everybody’s using it all the time because it’s inexpensive, it’s coming with the Office 365 package anyway and everybody has been using it for instant messaging one another while working from home and conferencing and all that stuff. But still, you want to ask yourself are our employees already using Teams and they’re living in Teams every single day and they love using Teams?

Well obviously that’s a big factor when you think, “Okay, should we do Microsoft Teams Phone System?”

On the other hand, if your employees really aren’t using Teams a whole lot today, it really opens up your possibilities. So there isn’t really as big of a draw for your company to consider using Teams Phone System if they aren’t really using it today because at the end of the day, you are going to have to pay a decent amount per user to start using Microsoft Teams Phone System… Probably the same amount as you’re going to pay with any other cloud PBX provider or more.

So definitely something of consideration, Teams adoption today.

Conferencing Requirements

Okay, something else you want to consider that I mentioned a little bit earlier is what are your conferencing needs?

Does your company need a robust conferencing platform and do you need features that Teams today does not have? Because if that’s the case, again, another reason why you may not be a great fit for Teams Phone System because maybe you’re already using multiple platforms because your conferencing needs are greater than what Teams conferencing can offer.

Microsoft Teams Phone System - Is it a good fit for your mid-size company in 2021?

Call Center

Another thing that you want to think about is does your company need a call center application? Because that’s a big part of the Phone System and that’s something Microsoft Teams Phone System does not offer.

So if you go with Microsoft Teams Phone System, you’re going to have to get a third party application layered on top of Teams Phone System to really work with your call center folks. So that already adds some complication to the mix, so if you have a big call center, Teams Phone System might not be the best fit, but it still may.

It kind of depends on all the other things that I’m talking about today.

CRM and App Integration

Last but not least, something that comes up quite a bit is you want to take into consideration your integration requirements with your software, like your ERP software or your sales automation software, like Salesforce and things like that.

A lot of companies these days are really wanting to integrate their software with their Phone System so that activity is automatically recorded in the customer record without any employee having to do anything, and if that’s a big deal, then with Microsoft Teams Phone System, you’re really a little bit limited in terms of software integration.

Yes it does integrate with Dynamics 365 quite a bit, but when you talk about Salesforce or any other type of software applications outside of the Microsoft family, it gets pretty dicey. So that’s something you definitely want to take into consideration.

Additional Questions

Now as I mentioned in the beginning of the video, there’s a lot of other things that you want to think about that will help you answer this question, but I hope that at least starts to narrow down your thinking a little bit of whether or not Teams Phone System is a good fit for your mid-sized company. Now if you’re wondering, “Hey, if we want to buy Teams Phone System, how should we do it?”

Well don’t start googling that. Just contact me, via email or phone (714.593.0011).

In terms of buying Teams Phone System, there’s a lot of different ways to do it, and one of the best ways is to go to a direct routing as a service provider to purchase it. There’s a lot of benefits, both cost-wise and service-wise to doing so, and the best vendors … There’s a lot of different vendors out there that are doing it and you want to find the best vendors and that’s something I can help you out with pretty quickly.

So don’t google it, just contact me. I’d be happy to help you. The best news of all this is that the service providers actually pay our company our broker fees so we’re a broker for all the major cloud PBX providers and Teams Phone System providers, so your company has no excuse not to contact us and get our advice because it’s free to you.

So don’t waste your time any more than you already have. Just contact me, I’m happy to help you, and if you like the video, don’t forget to hit the like button down below. I hope that helped you today and I will catch you on the next video.