The Queues App for Microsoft Teams Phone | Mike’s Pre-Launch Review

You’ve heard about the Queues app for Microsoft Teams, but you aren’t sure if it can handle your company’s call center requirements.

I’ve researched the Queues app and talked to industry leaders, and in this video, I’ll tell you what features it will have, which are on the roadmap, and which it will not have. I will also tell you if you should wait for the Queues app or purchase a different software app for your company’s call center.

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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 customer of mine has an on prem phone system currently and they’re moving everything over for the phone system side to team’s phone system. But they also have a call center application currently and they need to figure out what to do with that app. And as you’ve seen in my previous videos, Microsoft Teams does not have a call center solution. So in the midst of researching options for the customer, the customer brought up to me, Hey, what about the queues app for Microsoft teams? They had heard about that or no, if you’ve heard about it, but it’s supposedly launching around the July timeframe and they heard some buzz about it and they were wondering how is that going to help teams become more of a call center solution so that we can just use teams phone for everything for both the phone system and the call center through this new Queue’s app.

So I’ve heard a little bit about the queues app, but after this customer asked me, I thought, You know what, I better do a lot of research on it, even though it is coming out soon. Maybe I should start kind of getting ahead of the thing and researching it. So I did a ton of research on it, talked to all of my contacts within the industry, my insider information contacts who sell Microsoft licensing, who sell Microsoft teams, phone system, got information from them, watch some videos, looked at the documentation from Microsoft, and I learned some cool stuff that I wanted to share with you in this video regarding whether or not the queues up for Microsoft teams is going to help give teams phone system a call center component. And I’m going to talk to you about what I learned in this video.

My recommendations

But first, if you’d like my recommendation on the best call center applications for your organization and the best phone system service providers to use for Microsoft teams phone system, reach out and contact me. Send me an email, give me a call (714.593.0011). It’s the reason why I do these videos. So if you like the video, it’s a great way to say thank you to me. Just send me an email, give me a call, ask me for my help. I’d love to give you my recommendations. More information on that at the end of the video. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to the channel. I put out a new video at least once a week, so by subscribing it’ll make sure that you don’t miss any of the videos I put out there and let’s get to the content.

How much does Queues cost?

All right. So like I mentioned at the beginning of the video, because of my customers inquiry, to me I did a bunch of in-depth research on the Queues app for Microsoft teams, and my intent was really to find out, is this going to be a viable contact center software solution or some type of a way to augment teams phone system in order to give it the contact center features it needs in order to have a contact center component so that my team’s phone system customers don’t have to go elsewhere to get their call center software solution. So what I’m doing here is I’m going to tell you what I learned. All right. So the first thing is cost. How much is it going to cost? Well, we don’t know everything. I should say this about everything I’m going to say today is that we don’t know for sure on a lot of this stuff because Microsoft has not released all of the information on the Queues app for teams.

They’ve just given a little bit of the information at the announcement, I think, which was back in March. And then there’s some videos on it, some documentation on it, some stuff in the resource center online for Microsoft teams. So nobody knows for sure how all the features are going to work, how the pricing is going to work, but there are little hints here and there. So for sure we know that it’s going to be part of teams premium. So in order to get the cues up, you’re going to have to have teams premium for each user who’s going to be involved in the queues out. Now, in addition to getting teams premium, which I think is around $7 per month per user, there might be another add on for the Queues app. I’m not sure if there is or not or if that’s just going to be part of the Queues app. We’ll find that out in July. So that’s pricing.

3 Categories I’ll be covering

Now in terms of features and capabilities, I’m going to break this down to you in three different categories. The first category being features that Microsoft has announced has announced that the Queues app will have at launch. The second category is features that the Queues app will have on the roadmap. And the third category is going to be features that have not been mentioned at all, which in my opinion means it does not have these features at launch.

Features the Queues App will have

 So let’s go over those the Queues application. For teams will have real time reporting and analytics on your call. Queues and that will include wall boards. all the extent of the of the reports that are available is if any, if you’ve ever looked into call center queue analytics on a real time call Queues. There are so many different analytics and so many reports that you can pull with that. So whether or not it’s going to be equivalent to the contact center solutions that are already out there in the marketplace, I don’t know, but I know that they will have real time analytics and wall boards. They will also have the ability to pull a call history on call Queues. So historical reporting.

And lastly, we know that the Queues app will allow agents to log in and log out of their call queue and also give managers the ability to remotely log agents in and out. And that is the extent of it in terms of things that Microsoft has released the Queues app will have.

Features on the Queues App roadmap

Now they’ve also listed some stuff on the roadmap. First on the roadmap is the ability to export call reports. So obviously that’s not capable right now. They don’t have the ability to export call reports, but that is on the roadmap.

Second is the ability to have like barge and training. So a barge in whisper mode, listen in, take over things like that, that is on the roadmap.

Features not included in the Queues App

Now let’s get into the things that were not mentioned, which in my opinion means they’re not going to be included with the cues up for Microsoft teams, IVR with data, dips, detailed agent timelines, like the ability to see when agents logged in, when they logged out, call tracing to be able to see kind of trace the history of a call, kind of doing a postmortem on a call, being able to see like, okay, this call first went to this person, then it got transferred to this person, then it went to this person and then the actual caller dropped the call. So that has not been mentioned. policy based call recording, which is call recording based on you can assign calls to be recorded based on different user groups like different policies. So you can have different policies for different user groups, rep time analytics, being able to see how long an agent is taking in between calls to wrap up that call, doing that, this positioning and so forth. Also omnichannel, queuing, the ability to have more than just phone calls in the queue, for instance, web chat, SMS, email and social media, things like that. So that is not available at this at this time. A huge one, skills based routing. So they have said that the Queues app does not have anything to do with an auto attendant or IVR that is already in teams phone and teams phone does not have skills based routing, which is a huge component of call center software, quality assurance or otherwise known as quality management, which is things like post call surveys, call scoring, see SAT scores, customer sentiment analysis, the ability to see if a customer is angry on the phone or happy on the phone, or what words are being mentioned again and again and again, or what an agent might be saying too many times on a call, or there’s too many pauses on a call, or their speech is a little bit off, like they’re talking too fast, things like that.

Features not included in the Queues App

None of that has been mentioned. So I’m assuming none of those are going to be included with the Queues out screen recording the ability to record your contact center agent’s screen or screens, multiple screens. CRM integration or ERP integration. So if your company is using Salesforce, having a deep integration with Salesforce, that’s something that teams does not have today or other software applications like HubSpot and so forth. So so none of that along the same lines, no full API access. So I’ll say you’re using a CRM today that has a telephony integration capability, but you need for open APIs from your telecom provider or your contact center provider in order to integrate that into your current CRM or ERP software or teams. Phone does not have full open API, so in neither will the queues app at launch outbound dialer application. So no dialer with that. Similar to that is agent scripting the ability to have certain scripts deployed for agents and one of the big ones IVA So this is intelligent virtual agent, that’s a bot, either a voice bot or a web chat bot or an email bot, a bot that is able to use things like large language models and you know, any type of AI in order to basically alleviate the human element of your contact center for your frequently asked questions and quick orders, quick order status requests, things like that. There’s there’s no IVR. And lastly, and one of the something that’s really important is no advanced training or implementation help. So like teams phone compared to the other contact center applications, the other contact center applications put a heavy emphasis on training because this is obviously very important part of the business, very complex, and you’re going to need a lot of good training to help really implement it correctly and make sure you’re using all the features the way they’re supposed to be used. So that hasn’t been mentioned at all with the Queues app launch.

My advice for you on the Queues App

So what’s my opinion of all this? My opinion of all this, if you can’t tell, is that, you know, the Queues app is definitely a step in the right direction. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s it’s better than nothing. But for me, there’s so many missing components to it at launch. And considering that Microsoft hasn’t had a very good reputation for roadmap items, you know, getting them to, you know, to fruition soon with teams phone, I don’t have a lot of confidence in the roadmap for that happening any time soon. And considering the number of feature gaps that they have compared to all of the top context center applications out there today, I just don’t think the Queues app is going to be something that you need to really be waiting for to use for your contact center application.

My advice to my customer and my advice to you is that as of right now, don’t really wait for it. Just go ahead and get a third party contact center application. That’s top of the line that has excellent integration with teams. If your company wants to use teams phone system for your regular users and a great contact center application for your call center, do that and just make sure your call center application has is has certified integration with Microsoft teams phone. That would be my recommendation just because hey who knows Microsoft might launch this and it might take months or probably years in order to get it up to speed, if at all. So really, no reason to worry about it. No reason to think about it a whole lot. But as of right now, it seems like there’s a lot of feature gaps and the fact that it’s a separate application that you have to use that’s just for Queues is to me it sounds kind of clunky, like why aren’t they unifying it into a just a single application for the entire contact center as you’d get with any third party contact center application.

Reach out and contact me

Go ahead and get teams phone system if you are a good fit for teams phone system, if your company is and then for the call center applications use a third party application that has a really good teams phone integration, like they can integrate with things like presence. You can check out my other videos on that topic there, so I hope that was helpful.

Again, if you’d like my recommendation on the best vendors to quote for teams phone system or for contact center applications, reach out, Send me an email, give me a call (714.593.0011). I love to help you. I’m a broker for all the major service providers out there that do this stuff, so I know the entire landscape. And based on your companies requirements, I can get you the best vendors to quote right away. I will help you make a better decision in a fraction of the time. So based on your recommendations, I’ll maybe recommend two or three vendors to, quote, oversee the coding process for you. Make sure you get the best quotes. I’ll introduce you to the best salespeople all at these service providers to work with that I work with on a regular basis, and I’ll give you technology recommendations on things my customers have enjoyed on the different features, different technology that’s out there like A.I. and all that good stuff. So reach out. Give me a call. I’d love to help you again. It’s the reason why I do these videos. I’d love to talk about this stuff. I do it all day long and don’t forget to subscribe to the channel like the video, ring the bell, all that good stuff. If you subscribe to the channel. Hey, I put out one of these videos at least once a week, sometimes twice a week, so it’ll make sure you don’t miss any of my new videos.

Well, thanks for watching and I will catch you on the next one.