Microsoft Teams Phone System Pricing 2021

Microsoft Teams Phone System looks like a solid option for your organization, but what is Microsoft Teams Phone System pricing in 2021?

In this video, Mike Smith details each item your company will need to purchase, according to your company’s level of Office 365 licensing (i.e. Business vs. Enterprise). He also gives you the approximate total costs, and provides some experienced insight into whether or not Teams Phone System will be a good fit, depending on the situation.

Want Mike to give you his recommendations on the best vendors to quote, for Microsoft Teams Phone System (Direct Routing as a Service)? Click the button below and ask him today.

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 looking into a new phone system, and one of the options you’re considering is Microsoft Teams Phone System to replace your existing PBX. But like everyone else, you’re probably wondering, how much does it really cost? I know you’ve looked around and some of the websites out there give you a little bit of information, but it’s still confusing between features and calling plans and all that stuff. So I wanted to make a quick video and explain some of this stuff to you and hopefully clear some of this stuff up.

All right, the first thing I wanted to talk about was your Office 365 licensing. That is going to affect the pricing for Microsoft Teams Phone System. For instance, if your company has a business level license like Business Standard or Business Premium, the first thing you’re going to have to do is add the Business Voice Bundle to your Office 365 licensing. And what the Business Voice Bundle includes is the phone system feature that allows your teams to have a dial pad within it, and also a conferencing feature so that you can have your own conferencing bridge. So you might be saying, “Well, we don’t need our own conferencing bridge. Not every user in our company needs their own conferencing bridge.” Well, unfortunately on the business level licensing, it doesn’t matter whether or not the user needs it. Your only option to add a phone system is to get the Business Voice Bundle that includes both the phone system feature and the conferencing feature added on for every single user. So you can get the Business Voice Bundle with either a calling plan or without a calling plan. With a calling plan, it’s around $20 a month, which I think right now is discounted to around $15 a month because of the pandemic for a limited time. Or you can get the Business Voice Bundle without a calling plan, and that bundle is around $12 per month per user typically.

So that’s the first thing you need to do in terms of your licensing if you’re on a Business Office 365 plan. Now, if you’re on an Enterprise Office 365 plan, your options are a little bit different. So in terms of licensing, you definitely have to add the phone system feature, which is around $8 per month per user, which is that feature that I mentioned earlier that adds that dial pad to your team’s software. But with an Enterprise license, you can add the phone system feature just al-a-cart, so by itself. You don’t have to add the conferencing feature for every single user. So if you have an Enterprise plan either E1 or E3, you have to add that phone system feature per user, but you don’t have to add the conferencing feature. And I think the government licensing is the same thing. It’s just G instead of E, or something along those lines. So that’s the same thing.

Now, if you have an E5 license, if your company has E5 licenses, that license already includes both the phone system feature and the conferencing feature as part of that license. So you don’t have to purchase a phone system feature or a conferencing feature. So just to reiterate, so on an Enterprise license on E1 or E3, you do have to add an $8 phone system feature per month per user, and every live extension needs a phone system add on to their Office 365 licensing, every extension, every user. And then optional, you can add the conferencing feature, which is usually around $4 per month per user for those users who need their own dial in conference bridge. So that’s the pricing for the Office 365 licensing. Now, in addition to that, you also have to add a calling plan. So remember I mentioned earlier that the business level licenses with the business voice package, you can either have it with a calling plan or without a calling plan.

So if you have a with a calling plan, then you’re good, then you don’t need anything else. But if you got the Business Voice Package add on for your Business Standard license or your Business Premium license and you’ve got the Business Voice Package as the add on without a calling plan, you’re going to have to add a calling plan for each user. And that’s going to be the same thing if you’re on an Enterprise license and you added a phone system feature for your licensing, you also have to add a calling plan per user. So the standard pricing for a calling plan with Microsoft, not including discounts and everything, is usually around $8 per month per user for the calling plan. So that’s in addition to the phone system feature and the conferencing feature, or in addition to E5. So even if you have E5 and you have the phone system feature and conferencing feature built in, E5 does not come with a calling plan, so you still would have to add a calling plan for every single user.

Now, when it comes to adding a calling plan, my recommendation is not to get the calling plan through Microsoft directly. The reason why is because there’s a lot of third party service providers who give you a lot of options when it comes to the calling plan. So you can either buy the calling plan from them or you can buy their Teams phone system integration, which is in essence a calling plan. It’s giving you dial tone for your Teams. And the reason why I recommend other vendors for that is because, when you get the calling plan from another vendor, it’s usually less expensive, and on top of that, you get better service all around. So, for instance, when you go to call one of these providers, they can not only give you a quote for the calling plan, they can demo Teams Phone System for you, answer all of your questions.

They’ll ask you a bunch of questions about your company and come up with a whole deployment plan for you of, “Okay, this would be the best way to deploy it based on your current providers and phone numbers and numbers of locations,” all that good stuff. So they can help walk you through that. And then once you sign up with them, they’ll assign a project manager to you. They’ll help you with number porting, all that good stuff, a lot more of the hands-on customer service that you’re used to with a phone service provider or a phone system provider. And then longterm, those same providers that you’re getting the calling plan from, they’ll also give you unlimited live 24/7 customer support, and that’s not something you can get for free from Microsoft. So Microsoft does offer live support, but you have to pay for it, whereas with these vendors, it’s part of the package. When you get the calling plan from them, you automatically get unlimited live 24/7 support on all of your dial tone.

So if you have an outage, you have somebody live that you can talk to, a normal human being you can talk to right away. You’re not trying to submit a ticket online or anything crazy like that. So it’s less expensive, you get a lot more services. It’s just a better way to go. And on top of that, some of those vendors, they’re actually going to give you more features packed into Microsoft Teams Phone System than you will if you go to Microsoft direct. So, for instance, right now, as I’m making this video, Teams Phone System, Microsoft, does not offer SMS texting, send and receive text messages from your work phone number, from your soft phone from Teams. But some of these outside vendors allow that. So not only is it less expensive, but they’re actually activating some features that Microsoft doesn’t have directly. So that’s a much better way to go for the calling plan, but all in all, assume around $8 per month per user or less. Say, you have hundreds of users, it’s going to be less than that, but that’s a good gauge.

So, all in all, when you look at Microsoft Teams Phone System pricing, not talking about E5 people, because if you’re on an E5 license, it’s about half the cost because you’re already paying for the phone system feature and the conferencing feature. But if you’re on E3, E1, or a business level license, when you look at all the pricing included that you’re going to have to upgrade from today, with the license you have today, adding the phone system feature and the calling plan and possibly some conferencing, you’re looking at around, I’d say, somewhere between 15 to $20 per month per user, which if you’re a midsize company and you have a good amount of users, hundreds of users, or thousands of users, that’s about what you’re going to pay with any other cloud PBX solution. But as we know, Microsoft Teams Phone System does have some feature and functionality gaps.

So that’s going to be something you’re going to have to evaluate, because you’re going to pay about the same, but you’re going to get a little less. What you’re going to get in return though is the convenience of having one app for everything. So there’s some good and bad to decide about, but that’s up to you.

But if you want to know which vendors are the best vendors to go to, to get the calling plans from, don’t Google it. Email or call me (714.593.0011). That’s my job. I’m a broker for all the major cloud PBX companies and all the companies that do Microsoft Teams Phone System direct routing as a service, which is outsourcing that calling plan that we’re talking about. I represent all of them. So based on your company’s needs, I’ll be able to tell you the best three to four vendors that I’d recommend if I were you that you should quote, and I can help you get introduced to the right people at those vendors, get a demo on Teams Phone System, get all the quotes, and I’ll make sure you get better pricing than you’d have ever gotten if you called in direct.

And if you ended up signing up with one of them, our customers get premier customer service with that company, a lot better than they’d get if you just call in on your own. So no reason not to reach out and ask me for my advice. And by the way, all those service providers pay our company our broker fee so your company doesn’t have to. So absolutely no excuse not to reach out. Ask me questions about Microsoft Teams. As anyone will tell you. I’m happy to answer your questions as much as I can, and I’m happy to give you demos and quotes and all that stuff too. So reach out. I’m happy to help. If this video was helpful to you, please don’t forget to hit the like button down below. And I’ll catch you on the next one.