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Teams voice solutions – affordably?

A modern way to get a functional phone system for your company. Affordably, quickly, without commitments. To believe this or not?

It must have been 2020 when Teams voice solutions were being hyped by Microsoft. At that time, Microsoft itself was about to launch a voice solution that worked without the domestic operator, meaning phone numbers and the entire phone system directly from Microsoft without complicated agreements. This truly excited an old telecommunications professional. Until then, you could only get phone features for Teams with the operator’s own PSTN setups. I wanted to explore the topic and start bringing this technology to the forefront even then, but the time wasn’t right. The market entry in Finland seemed to be stretching, and nothing was really heard from elsewhere in the market either.

Trying out Teams phone solutions

I’ve always admired startup companies for how admirably agile they can build their business on SaaS cloud services and do things in a new way. When my business partner Mika suggested when founding Above IT, “What if we test Microsoft’s own Teams phone solutions directly as our voice solution,” I didn’t hesitate for a moment. It was time to finally try the technology in practice. After all, it’s now 2024, these must be production-ready by now. There was no need to transfer any existing number space either, so there was an almost compelling need to start investigating the matter.

After examining Teams phone solutions and comparing phone subscriptions and enterprise-level voice solutions for our company, the choice was clear. Teams voice solutions at the time of writing this blog, including all domestic calls, cost just over €18/user/month, or billed according to usage, just over €10/user/month. Resource numbers, such as call groups and queues, without any costs.

Above IT with calls in the cloud

All in all, we got a professional-level phone system up and running for our small company relatively easily and with little work. We now have our own business numbers for everyone, which ring for us in Teams during office hours if we’re available – or they can be forwarded to our own mobile phones.

I designed and created great phone queues for us – one for the company/sales, and another for Customers. The queues were relatively easy to adjust and configure, create rotating rings or queues that recognize available people.

By the way, you should try calling our sales at +358 (0)9 4272 6725 and test how nicely the greeting texts I wrote at the beginning of the queue were converted from text to speech. At the same time, you can easily arrange a meeting, so we can fine-tune the same technology for you to test.

Final comments

If your company currently uses purely mobile subscriptions and you’re considering a proper phone solution with queues – some operator might get upset now, but it’s worth genuinely considering whether to tie yourself to an operator’s leash for three years, or to implement Teams calls for the company as a lightweight deployment.

Based on the initial feel and our own experiences, the voice solutions work. We are not a phone system partner – in this case, Microsoft is, but as a technology, I already dare to recommend and consult on this quite naturally.

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