Choosing the Best Plan for Calling within Microsoft Teams

Investing in digital solutions like Microsoft Teams expands the collaborative experience to virtually every corner of your business, including your customers, but are you maximizing the value of this powerful platform?

Even digitally mature organizations who have enabled this Unified Communications solution often don’t realize its full potential because they aren’t yet using the Teams Calling feature to its fullest extent.

Microsoft has a lot to offer when it comes to telephony in the cloud, but you may not know which is the best solution for your organization. Let’s delve into the benefits of Teams Calling and how you can choose the best plan for calling within Microsoft Teams.

To unlock even more from your investment in Microsoft 365, consider adding the Phone System capability to your Microsoft Teams platform. If you have an E5 license then you already have the entitlement to use telephony on Teams.

With this feature enabled, you can use Microsoft Teams as the complete telephony system for your organization. This will enable you to consider retiring your expensive traditional telephony equipment (PBX). Larger organizations typically have more than one telephony system for a variety of reasons, often because companies are spread across multiple countries or through organic growth and acquisition. Unifying on a single solution with Phone System, not only saves on cost, but simplifies your telephony into a single unified communications solution, improving ROI and enabling your teams to communicate seamlessly both internally and externally. This means that your hybrid workforce can make or receive those important calls, no matter where they are.

But before enjoying the many great business outcomes that can take place, it’s essential to find the right calling model. Microsoft offers customers the power of choice but picking the best option for your business is not always easy.

In this article we dig into the real benefits of cloud telephony on Microsoft Teams and we decode the various options available, to help you make an informed decision for your business.

When using telephony, businesses are often faced with common challenges, including:

• Separate telephony contracts and different suppliers for each business location.
• Call Center staff that have to use different applications for calling, messaging and collaboration
• Expensive, ageing traditional telephony systems that need ongoing maintenance and support
• Challenges integrating your telephony platform with modern UC platforms like Microsoft Teams or a cloud contact center
• Dial-in audio-conferencing that isn't integrated with Microsoft Teams meetings
• Employees having to switch between a headset for a video call and an ageing desk phone for an audio call
• Hybrid workers unable to make or receive work calls at home
• Conference rooms that don’t integrate telephony with video and web conferencing

By providing solutions to all these issues and more, Microsoft Teams empowers full cloud voice services through the Teams platform. The Phone System is a major component of Teams and organizations use it for a wide range of business functions.

While we have touched on the benefits already of Teams as a telephony replacement system, it is important to know what else it has to offer. Here’s a closer look at some of the other benefits of Teams calling: