Welcome to this blog series on Microsoft Teams Calling, in this blog we discuss advanced call handling and distribution with Microsoft Teams.
Auto Attendants provide several key features to aid in advanced call handling. They can offer an IVR or menu structure for people to select from. These options can include pre-recorded announcements, voicemail or external destinations. Importantly, Auto-Attendants provide time-of-day routing with both opening/closed times as well as holiday closures allowing for different call routing depending on the time of day or on specific days.
Call queues distribute calls between users, otherwise known as agents. Multiple methods of routing are available including, round-robin and attendant (also known as ring all) Limits can be set to restrict the number or the amount of time people are in the queue for, allowing calls to be redirected if busy. Users can be agents in multiple call queues and can be granted permission to log in or out of them on a per queue basis.
Rather than using an Azure AD group to contain agents for a call queue, a channel within a Team can be used instead. This allows for things like shared call queue history and collaboration during the call.
Both Auto-attendants and call queues require a resource account to operate and be found within the Address Book. All resource accounts need what is now called a Teams Phone Resource Account license (previously known as phone system virtual user license) to operate and be correctly identified.
Every organization that has a subscription with Teams Phone included, is allocated 25 Teams Phone Resource Account licenses available at no cost. For every 10 user licenses with Teams Phone, one more license becomes available. For example, if you purchase 600 licenses you are allotted an initial 25 plus 60 Teams Phone Resource Account licenses, entitling you to 85 in total. If you need more then additional licenses can be purchased.
For users to receive calls they must be Enterprise voice-enabled, which is provided through the Teams Phone license. There are also some additional prerequisites if using direct routing to provide the telephone number for call queues.
What happens if you need more advanced call handling, features or reporting for call distribution?
That’s where contact centre solutions come in, they can enhance call handling and distribution as well as provide multi-channel interactions. There are three models of contact centres solutions,
Connect, which uses certified SBCs and Direct Routing to connect contact centres solutions and Teams phone system infrastructure. Teams Graph API allows the solution to retrieve information about agents and their status.
Extend, which builds on connect and allows the use of Cloud Communication API to keep the contact centre calls and call control within the Teams Phone System
And lastly, Power, which enables partner solutions to create native Azure-based voice applications using the Teams calling infrastructure.
Microsoft provides a certification process for contact centres to gain accreditation. This list is growing with more solutions currently going through the process. Solutions and their capabilities can vary between vendors, therefore evaluation of multiple solutions should be undertaken to find the solution that fits your needs, risual has relationships with multiple vendors and can assist with this.
Please get in touch if you’d like to learn more.
