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STEPHEN ROSE: Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode
of "Inside Microsoft Teams."
I'm your host, Stephen Rose.
Thanks for joining us.
And we have another Double-Click series,
but before we do, hey,
as you can see, I'm working from home and it's great.
We're talking a lot about that in these sessions,
so you might hear some background noise.
It's because we're at home,
so it's fine.
Anyways, back again,
and I'm so happy, Daniela,
you came back to join us again for another episode.
Thank you.
Today you said you want to chat a little more,
building upon our last session, on customer engagement
and auto-attendants and call queues
and kind of understanding what it is,
voice-enabled channels.
And this is a business that I understand
has really grown since the start of the pandemic.
If I understand correctly,
you're saying there's been a 200% increase
in customers that are now using call queues
and auto-attendants, et cetera.
So what does that mean?
What is this functionality,
and what does it mean and why is it important?
DANIELA CHOCRON: Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, as you mentioned, Stephen,
we're currently in a world where everything
and everyone have connected.
Our customers' expectations have evolved.
I know as we think about when you and I
are interacting with different brands and organizations
we want quick answers,
personalized offerings and services,
and seamless interactions
with the organizations that you're interacting with.
And the first contact that brands have
with customers really sets a tone
for the relationship and the relationship
between the organization and the customers.
So, with Teams Phone and Microsoft Teams,
you can enable really everyone
across your organization to better help,
better serve and delight your customers.
And for many of our customers,
as you mentioned,
this starts with our call queues
and our auto-attendant capabilities,
which we've seen a spike in usage
over the last year. And call queues,
auto-attendants, and voice-enabled channels
really enable enterprises and small businesses
to interact directly with their customers and teams.
So, I'm excited to walk you all
through a little bit about what each of these features are.
How do you set them up in Teams?
What are some common questions that we get
from our customers?
But, let me start off with kind of talking a little bit
about some more broadly
and kind of what are the different ways
that you can use Teams to manage
your customer communications,
and how do these capabilities fit in?
So, I'm going to share a couple of slides
with you, Stephen.
As we were talking about,
there are four ways you can manage customer communications
and Teams today.
Customer connections with Teams Phone
can be simplified with auto-attendants,
call queues, and voice-enabled channels
that we'll talk about today.
But in addition to these customer experiences,
customer connection experiences and Teams,
there's a few other options that you can use.
We have our partner program that certifies
contact center solutions to integrate with Teams.
We currently have 18 solutions that have been
certified to seamlessly integrate with Teams.
Also, the Microsoft Digital Contact Center platform
that's built to ensure multi-modal connectivity
and interoperability with Teams,
connecting support agents with subject matter experts,
facilitating the collaboration with customers
as well with Azure Communication Services,
you can also extend the value of Teams
by building custom stand-alone applications
and a great voice video and audio
and telephony for Teams users.
So, you can see there's a number of options available
depending on the level of scale
and customization that you need.
So, you can think of especially our Microsoft
Digital Contact Center platform as a really
robust contact center solution offering available.
But now let's talk through auto-attendants,
call queues, voice-enabled channels
and how you can use them in Teams Phone today
to really engage your customers
and empower real-time collaboration
across your organization.
These capabilities are available
for all customers with a Teams Phone license.
So, let's walk you through
and let's start with auto-attendants.
What this capability is
is, it lets you set up a menu option
that you can route callers based on your callers' choices.
I think many of us are familiar when you've pressed 1
for service, 2 for marketing,
3 for HR,
that type of of menu that you've set up.
So, administrators can create
and manage multi-level auto-attendants
to serve as the frontline of communication
with your customers for the first time
that a customer calls your organization.
STEPHEN ROSE: So, that could be things like holiday hours
and greetings or hey,
where do you want this call to go to. Correct?
DANIELA CHOCRON: Absolutely, yes.
So you can either do kind of a click,
many of us are used to kind of,
if you press this number
you can get directed to this line.
But you could also do it using directory search
and speech recognition
of just actually being able to ask a directory
for the person that you're looking to call.
STEPHEN ROSE: Hang on. I get to use my movie phone voice,
so hang on.
"Press 1 if you would like to see 'Ant-Man.'
Press 2 for tickets to whatever."
So yeah, but yes, you get it.
That's the idea.
DANIELA CHOCRON: Absolutely.
STEPHEN ROSE: I don't to do that voice very often,
so I enjoy doing it.
All right.
DANIELA CHOCRON: I think it's a great way to bring
auto-attendants to life.
Could not think of a better one.
But that's exactly what you can do with auto-attendants.
So, you can set up menu options.
So, you can route calls based on your customer's choices,
but you could also create complex routing with nested IVRs
that can be navigated via voice or DTMF.
So auto-attendants, as we mentioned,
you can really set this up within a few clicks.
We also support a number of different languages for prompts,
text to speech, and speech recognition.
And as you talked about, Stephen,
you can specify depending on the time of day
or holiday hours different routing.
And these are very closely connected with call queues.
So, for situations when callers need to reach someone
with a particular specialty,
if you can think about, for example,
in the scenario that we were just talking about,
if you press 1 for Sales.
But then you need to...
STEPHEN ROSE: Two for shipping,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, right?
DANIELA CHOCRON: Yeah. So, you want to reach
the Sales department.
You're not reaching a specific question you can think of
of somebody setting up a call queue of the people
within that Sales department that are currently
available to answer customer calls,
and then calls will get routed
to that group versus a specific individual.
So, that's where auto-attendants
and call queues really work together.
So you can help use queues to connect callers
to the group of agents who can assist them
if you're not looking to connect someone directly
to a specific person within the organization.
STEPHEN ROSE: Do we support something like voice recognition
on that, too?
If I say "customer service" or something like that,
do we support that, or is that a plug-in
that somebody else might provide?
How does that part work?
DANIELA CHOCRON: Yeah. So, that is part of our
auto-attendant capability.
So you can use...
STEPHEN ROSE: Okay. DANIELA CHOCRON: Yeah.
Voice recognition to set up that menu option
that you would route callers to instead of a number
of pressing 1 or 2.
So, as I mentioned, these queues,
you can use them to outwardly engage with your customers
and handle incoming customer call volumes.
So obviously, sales or support are good examples,
but you can also use them
internally with your organization.
So, for interdepartmental routing.
So for example,
if you want to ensure that calls are routed
to the most available team member,
oftentimes we are calling our IT department
when your laptop or your camera breaks down.
So that's really a great way for you to manage
your internal customers, as well, too.
So making sure someone's always there
and available to help them with call queues.
And we support a number of different features--
music on hold, shared voicemail,
timeout, and call handling rules that ensure
that the customer communications are never lost,
even when a call queue might be temporarily busy.
We always want to make sure that you
are continuing to delight your customers.
So, call queue members can also place calls
using the outgoing caller ID
of the call queue that they're working on
to really help customers understand where
calls are coming from and anonymize agents, as well--
so, avoid sharing their personal information and extensions.
This is a capability that we launched last year
to continue to enhance our call queue experience.
So now, let's talk about voice-enabled channels,
which is really how you can service these capabilities
even more naturally in Microsoft Teams.
Voice-enabled channels allow customers
to turn any Teams channel into a Teams-based call queue,
enabling collaboration and information sharing
before, during, or after the call.
So it really expands the opportunities
for you to collaborate more closely
with the groups or the team members
that you're working on within a call queue.
So, you can also add the ability to do real-time
transcription and overlay AI on it.
So, that opens up a lot more possibilities
that bring together collaboration
and communication experiences in Teams.
STEPHEN ROSE: Can we also add things like Power Platform
or Power Virtual Agents,
or bots to that as part of that, as well?
DANIELA CHOCRON: Yes, absolutely.
So, to go one step further,
Teams Phone can benefit from other embedded capabilities
of Microsoft 365, as you just mentioned.
So for example,
Power Virtual Agents is incorporated into Teams.
So, you can see you can build a custom chat bot
without any complex coding,
and then link the chat bot with Teams Phone, as well.
So you'll see here on this demo that I'm showing you,
a user is chatting with the bot,
but if they want to speak to someone on the phone,
they can click the phone number provided by the bot,
which dials a call queue to connect into a group of users.
And then, that surfaces this call
within a voice-enabled channel.
So, really bringing in the full power
of the Microsoft ecosystem.
STEPHEN ROSE: Now, how difficult is this to set up,
and what are some of the gotchas
that folks should keep in mind with this?
DANIELA CHOCRON: Yeah, absolutely.
So, I think before I'll walk you through
how you can set these up,
I'd love to share one of what newest capabilities
that we announced at Ignite this past year
that really ties this together even further
and gives you more opportunities
to streamline the engagement with your customers.
So, at Ignite, we launched screen pop for Teams Phone,
which gives admins the ability to assign
for specific team members--
for example, team members that are part of a call queue--
the ability to have customer records pulled up
as the incoming call is answered.
So you'll see here in this demo that I'm showing you,
for example, if you are using Salesforce CRM,
the moment that you get an incoming PSTN call,
that will pull up the customer records within Salesforce
and a browser pop out,
which allows you to make sure
that you have easy access to that information
and that background and that you're not really
missing a beat while you're answering a customer call
and switching between applications.
STEPHEN ROSE: I always wondered how that worked
when they go,
"Hi, Mr. Rose. Thanks for calling
our Delta Airlines Platinum line."
So that's cool.
I get it.
All right
DANIELA CHOCRON: Awesome. So now, we'll jump into
kind of how you can set these up.
And it's really very seamless, as you see here in this demo.
It's really easy to create auto-attendants
and call queues directly from the Teams admin center.
Admins can choose to upload a custom audio greeting message,
for example, or you can use the built-in text-to-speech
functionality, as well, as we talked
about when we were talking about auto-attendants.
And if needed, you can also create advance
and complex call routing menus.
You can add the dial by name that we mentioned
or extension options
within just a few clicks here in the admin center.
Call queues also offer a number
of customizable settings, such as music on hold.
You can set up call overflow and call timeout options.
And then, assigning the call queue
to your employees is really simple, as well.
Or adding an existing group or Teams channel.
All this is done through the admin center.
As you see here, incoming calls are
going to ring to the group
or channel members based on the choices that are set
by the admins. And to give greater visibility
into how these features are being used,
historical reporting for auto-attendants
and call queues is currently available today in Power BI
but will soon be available in the Teams admin center,
just like you would access call details records
within admin center.
STEPHEN ROSE: Well, what about the gotchas?
So, we were chatting about that earlier.
DANIELA CHOCRON: Absolutely.
So, there's a few questions that we get
from customers when they're setting up auto-attendants,
call queues, or voice-enabled channels in Teams.
So, want to take this opportunity to
answer them for you all.
So, auto-attendants and call queues today
require an associated Teams Phone resource account license.
Organizations with a subscription that includes Teams Phone
are allocated a certain amount of Teams Phone resource
account licenses at no extra cost.
But there are some common questions we get
about our resource account licensing.
So, something to keep in mind is resource account
licensing requires time to complete provisioning prior
to assigning a phone number to that account.
And also, if you're using Microsoft Teams calling plans,
the usage location
of a resource account each match the country
of the phone number that's assigned.
For example, an admin can't assign a UK phone number
to a US resource account.
So definitely something to keep in mind
as you're setting up resource accounts
in the Teams admin center.
And lastly, a common question that we get is,
what type of admin roles can completely manage
voice-enabled channels?
So today, voice-enabled channels can't be completely managed
by a Teams communications admin role,
but they can be fully managed by global administrators.
So again, just something to keep in mind
as you're setting these up
and some common questions that we've heard
from you all that we wanted
to take this opportunity to answer.
STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome.
Anything else in kind of final thoughts here that folks...
I mean, this is a great overview.
Anything else that you would want to share with folks?
DANIELA CHOCRON: No.
I would say please check out the resources.
Please let us know
if there's any additional questions that you have.
But thank you so much for having me today, Stephen.
Really enjoyed chatting with you again today
and sharing with you all a little bit more
about how you can use Teams Phone to better connect
with your customers.
STEPHEN ROSE: Awesome.
And I know a lot of you are going to have more questions.
And again, this is really just,
here's the overview kind of understand it from the basics
and where to go to learn more.
There's so many other great resources we have
at Microsoft to drive you through how to plan,
deploy, manage, secure,
and even drive adoption of all this.
But hopefully, this is a good starting point
to answer those questions.
Danielle, thanks so much for your time today.
We greatly appreciate it.
And for everybody else,
we'll see you on our next episode of
"Inside Microsoft Teams."
Thanks for joining us today.
We'll see you soon.
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