Chat and video meetings already live in Microsoft Teams for a large number of UK businesses. Teams Phone puts public telephone calling in that same application.
How Teams Phone works
The service is Microsoft's cloud telephony. Public inbound and outbound calls travel across Microsoft's voice network. Staff take them in the Teams app on a laptop, a desktop PC, a mobile, or a desk handset Microsoft has certified for Teams.
The numbers customers already dial stay with the business. Porting them onto Microsoft typically takes two to four weeks. Callers continue to reach those numbers while the transfer completes.
What you need
A Teams Phone licence, sometimes sold as Microsoft 365 Business Voice. It's an extra licence on the Microsoft 365 subscription already in place. Pricing starts at around £6.50 per user per month.
A Microsoft calling plan, or Direct Routing. Calling plans package UK minutes, and international minutes if required, from Microsoft. Direct Routing attaches Teams to a SIP trunk from another provider. Firms with heavy outbound traffic often pay less that way.
Internet capacity for voice. Voice uses about 100Kbps for every call in progress at the same time. Twenty concurrent calls need at least 2Mbps of dedicated bandwidth and low jitter. A leased line or a properly specified FTTP circuit is the usual base.
Quality of Service on the firewall or router. Teams voice packets need priority over ordinary internet use, or audio quality drops when the rest of the network is busy.
Key features
- Auto-attendants. A spoken menu sends the caller to the right department.
- Call queues. Several people share inbound load, with music while they wait and an estimated wait time.
- Call recording. Keep audio for training, complaints handling or a compliance obligation.
- Voicemail with transcription. A missed call appears in Teams as a recording and as text.
- Transfer and forwarding. Pass a live call to a colleague, an outside number or voicemail.
- Simultaneous ring. Desk handset, laptop and mobile ring together.
- Call analytics. Volumes, quality figures and who has been active sit on a dashboard.
Common deployment mistakes
Emergency calling left unset. A 999 call from Teams must present a correct address for the site it is coming from. That is a UK regulatory requirement. Register an emergency location with Microsoft for every office before anyone places a live call.
Going live without a network check. Microsoft publishes a free tool that tests whether the LAN and internet can carry voice. Run it on the production network first. Shortfalls in bandwidth or jitter show up as clipped audio.
No time with the team. Staff used to a physical keypad need a short walkthrough of the software. Thirty minutes with each group, covering answer, hold, transfer and voicemail, is usually enough.
How this sits next to automation
Teams Phone replaces the telephone system. People answering those calls often still rekey the same details into a CRM or a spreadsheet. Workflow automation takes that after-call work off them. We scope it once calling is stable, on its own monthly plan.
How Wanzo deploys Teams Phone
We put the licences in place, port the numbers, build auto-attendants and queues, apply Quality of Service on the network, register emergency addresses and train users. Once the service is live, support sits inside managed IT. When call quality fails, we have the access to find the cause and restore it that day.
What to do next
If you're running Microsoft 365 and want calling inside Teams, send through how numbers, queues and sites work today. We'll come back with licences, porting, network work and a monthly figure before any cutover is booked.