Microsoft Teams Phone System – The Ideal Fit

Are you interested in Microsoft Teams Phone System but you’re not sure your company is an ideal fit?

In this video, I talk about why the ideal fit for Teams Phone is a large company with an E5 license, high Teams adoption, that barely uses the phones.

Want my recommendation on whether your company is an ideal fit for Microsoft Teams? Click below and ask me today.

ABOUT ME

Mike has been helping companies select the best telecom, WAN, security, and cloud services since 1999. Mike 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 me on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

Today’s video wanted to make a video on team’s phone system and kind of what is the perfect fit for teams phone system. So I get a lot of calls and folks want to talk to me about teams phone system and about their company asking if Teams phone system a good fit for us. And so many times I kind of explain, Hey, this is the best fit for a team’s phone system. This is what a good team’s phone system candidate looks like. And this is what a candidate for another cloud PBX vendor looks like. So I thought because I say it so much, I might as well make a video on it.

So that’s what I’m going to do today, is I’m going to kind of walk you through what it looks like if you know the perfect ideal fit for a team’s phone system for a company it would look like. So that’s the videos on today.

Ask me if your company is a good fit

But before we get too far ahead of myself, really quick plug. If you’d like my recommendation on the best vendors to quote for your company’s phone system, especially if you’re a large company, say 100 or more employees, don’t hesitate to reach out, contact me, shoot me an email, give me a call (714.593.0011). I’m happy to help. It won’t cost you a thing and I’ll give you some great recommendations. All right. And then also, if you’d if you like this video, if you could do me a big favor, hit the like button, subscribe to the channel, leave a comment down below that would really help me out. Much appreciated. And that’s a way you can say thank you if you got something from this videos.

Is Microsoft Teams an ideal fit for you?

All right so teams phone system your company say you have a few hundred employees, a few thousand employees, a few employees you’re wanting to know is teams phone system a good fit for our company and what we need?

All right. So to me, in my opinion, the best teams phone system scenario would be your company has several hundred to thousands of employees and you already have your company already has an E5 license, meaning that teams phone standard that add on feature that enables like the phone calling features is already included with the license that you have today and your company’s employees are using teams a ton every day for things like chat, collaboration, conferencing, everything like that. Everybody is super comfortable with teams and your company doesn’t use the phone a whole lot and you definitely don’t have a call center and you definitely don’t need a lot of fancy features because you’re your company barely uses the phone. You really just need phones for the sake of having a phone system and you really only need the basic features like calling transferring calls, voicemail, auto attendant, just the basics. You don’t need fancy reporting, you don’t need to record calls, you don’t need fancy features, you don’t need to send or receive text messages from your work number. You barely use the phone. You in some ways, you almost think you don’t even need a phone system. But you obviously have to have a phone system for 911 access and all that good stuff. So that’s what I would call the perfect fit for teams phone system.

Are larger companies better?

The reason why is because obviously if you have a lot of employees, a lot of times I.T. departments are saying, hey, we have a lot of employees, we don’t you know, we don’t necessarily need to have fancy features. And you know what? When it comes to I’ve noticed the larger a company is, the less they listen to the complaints of certain users who want certain features in their phone system.

Small company with five employees. If somebody is complaining about needing a feature, if they complain enough, they usually end up changing the phone system, getting them that feature that they want 5000 employees. That employee can complain all day long. They want that feature. It’s usually hey too bad this is the phone system we have. Whether or not you like it, this is what we do.

So that’s why I’m saying a lot of employees is a good fit.

Reduce costs with an E5 license

Having an E5 license makes it a great fit because if you’re already paying for the team’s phone standard feature, that’s something you don’t have to add on. So that’s a reduced cost. So normally if you have an E3 or an E1 or a business standard or business premium license, you’re going to have to add an $8 per month per user feature for teams phone standard.

So you have to add that feature. But with an E5 license that features already included. And on top of that, you’re also going to have to add a calling plan no matter what license you have. So the calling plan is roughly 4 to $12 per month per user depending on the service provider that you pick. And the features you need, things like that.

So you can imagine if you already have an E5 license and you shave that cost by $8, that really reduces the amount of additional cost that you’re going to have to pay to get teams phone system. So if your company already has an E5 license, it’s a lot less expensive to get teams phone system for your company than it is any other service provider out there.

If you have to add teams phone standard, meaning you have an E3 license or an E1 license or business standard business premium license. If you have to add that license, you’re going to pay overall about the same additional cost to get teams phone system as you would any other cloud phone system service provider. So that’s why that’s a big deal whether you have E5 or not.

Gaps in Teams

So and then teams in terms of calling why I say it’s a big deal if you don’t, if you barely use the phones or you don’t need a lot of features because you know, if you looked at any of my other videos, I’m pretty transparent that teams phone system has some feature gaps. It doesn’t do the fancy stuff.

The reporting isn’t very good. It does not have call center. It doesn’t do a lot of the fancy features like send or receive text messages from your work phone. There’s a lot of little cool features here and there. They don’t do like transcription on every single call or things like that where you just get some of these other cool features.

If you go with another cloud phone system and hey, if you’re going to pay the same amount per month per user as any other cloud phone system solution, you might as well get all the features you can get right. And so that’s why I say like, Hey, if your company doesn’t need a lot of features, team phone system is a good fit.

Already using Teams?

And then also if your users are using teams today, they’re currently using it every day for everything that they do. That’s obviously going to make it an easier transition for you to roll out teams phone system. You don’t have to download another app onto their phones. You don’t have to train them on a different app. They’re already using teams.

They know how to use teams. It’s just a very easy transition. So that to me is the ideal candidate for teams phone system. Now a lot of companies will come to me and they have one or two of those needs. They’ll say, Hey, we use teams all the time, but we like these features or we have an E3 license, we don’t have any five, so we have to add on.

So, you know, with those exceptions, I’m always hesitant to say teams phone system is definitely the best fit and if it’s not the best fit, I always recommend looking at other solutions like don’t just look at teams phone system because you know, people are using teams within your office. That doesn’t necessarily mean teams phone system is the best fit.

Considerations

And one thing to consider, you know teams phone system you know really came out in 2018. Since then there’s been a lot of things that they said were on the roadmap that they were going to add like SMS and things like that. You know, in 2018, here it is, 2023, those things still are not added. So Microsoft’s not pouring a ton of money into R&D, into teams phone system.

So it’s not the best thing in the world. It’s a good fit for certain businesses, but it’s not the best fit for every single company out there. And there’s nothing that says that teams phone system will not be replaced by Microsoft at some point, just like Skype was. So teams phone system isn’t necessarily going to be around forever. Just like the other cloud phone system, solutions aren’t necessarily going to be around forever. So you really have to look at it and dive into the weeds on what your companies requirements are and how those fit into teams phone versus the competitors out there.

Ask me for my recommendations

I hope that helped a little bit. If so, again, if you have any questions, shoot, you know, shoot me an email, give me a call (714.593.0011). If you’d like my recommendation on the best phone System Solutions your company should be quoting, I’ve been a broker in this industry for over 20 years, so I know all the best companies that your company should quote based on your requirements. I’ll save you a lot of time. I’ll help you avoid a lot of mistakes from signing up with the wrong companies, with bad reputations, things like that. Also, I will introduce you to the best people to work with at the providers. I recommend I’ll also oversee the quoting process to make sure you get the best pricing from those providers. And oh, by the way, it won’t cost you anything. I don’t charge you a broker fee. The service providers themselves pay me my broker fee so you don’t have to use.

There’s absolutely no reason to at least not reach out and see what I have to say. All right. Well, I hope you like the video and I will catch you on the next one.