If your client has simple requirements, you’re off to a good start. And by simple, we mean simple call flows and a basic IVR or auto-attendant (which are the same thing).
If you’re looking at a unified solution for your client, Teams Phone has you covered, and if the time of day rules on your auto attendant are limited to one or two variations, your client will be okay.
Complex call flows & provisioning
Complex call flows and queues are going to be a nightmare for you. If required, you should be looking elsewhere or at a third party integration
Teams can be configured to provide for most requirements, but the more complex the configuration, the more difficult management of the environment becomes. Documentation is a must.
If you are not looking to provide and/or manage a complex phone system, but your clients’ needs require that, we should discuss an alternative solution.
Virtualised/Remote Desktop environments are generally not suited or supported to run any audio or video products.
Teams Phone will have a better experience when used out of these environments or run in a Windows Virtual Desktop or Azure Virtual Desktop.
The showstoppers
Here is some detail on what isn’t going to work. If your client is running a call centre or a service desk, they’re not going to get the reporting they need. Teams Phone just hasn’t been designed to provide the sorts of features you’d expect a call centre manager or help desk supervisor to be looking for, for now at least.
From a reporting and analytics perspective, prepare to be underwhelmed. For PSTN calls the standard reporting only includes a PSTN minute pools report, which isn’t relevant to direct routing, a blocked users report, listing those who tried to make calls but weren’t allowed, and a PSTN usage report that shows the SIP address and call start and end times.
Microsoft say you can use the information in this report to gain insight into PSTN usage in your organisation and help you to investigate, plan, and make business decisions, but for our partners, illume (our customer portal) is going to give you far greater clarity and insights to do that.
Call Recordings
Lastly, call recording has recently been added as a natively supported feature, which is great news as this was seen as a key blocker by many potential clients until its addition.
It works in the same way as recording a regular 1:1 Teams call does. However, it falls short on compliance and quality assurance as there is no way to enforce this across your organisation or centralise the storage and retrieval of recordings.
It is important to highlight that only the user who initiates the recording has access to the recorded file saved in the user’s OneDrive.
This feature is aimed at the end-user and does not replace or complement compliance recordings.
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