How I Handle Customer Objections to Teams Phone (because it's not a PBX)

Since Microsoft Teams Phone released in late June 2018 the industry has been scrutinizing it for its (lack) of features compared to traditional VoIP platforms and PBXs.

Even now, in 2024, the occasional flare up on LinkedIn arises when Teams Phone doesn't do something a user once relied upon in 1999.

Sure, back in 2018, the Teams Phone feature set wasn't even close to parity with Microsoft's flagship UC product at the time, Skype for Business, let alone Call Manager, Avaya, Mitel, Nortel etc. etc.

6 years have passed, Microsoft listened, Microsoft closed the gap and now Teams Phone does more than just parity Skype for Business (SfB) did for its enterprise calling capabilities.

I am sure there is some super niche scenario you can still do on SfB by bolting on some 3rd party plugins and custom MSPL scripting, but the reality is that's a 'your problem' rather than a problem felt market wide. So now the feature parity argument is well and truly done with.

But I still get push back on parity with other PBX systems.

What I have come to realize over the years is that depending on the source of the pushback, the other person's agenda is one of two things.

1. If the person asking the question is an end customer, what they are really asking is "Am I going to be able to do something similar (not the same) in Teams to what I do currently? And if the answer is yes, what is the level of effort to adapt to the change?"
2. If the person is a competitor, whether that be an employee at a vendor or vendor's reseller, it's all to do with marketing and their effort to stay market relevant. Teams doesn't do this, our system does, use us but without any real substance of why that differentiation matters to end customers.

The fact is in all this, if an end user is aligned with Microsoft technology and has heavy investment in Office 365, they're going to at least explore Teams Phone for their telephony at some point and only if Teams Phone (and its ecosystem of partner solutions) cannot deliver what they are looking for, will they look elsewhere.

Along that journey they are going to find many things are different, some require workarounds, others require a little cultural updating, others they will find the same, and the rest they will actually find out they no longer need because its been superseded.

The opportunity and where I provide my value is within the 'workaround' and 'no longer need' spaces.

These are the two areas end customers worry about the most because they have the potential for the biggest negative impact to a project outcome.

There are a few reasons why hesitancy interferes with decision making.

1. Lack of domain knowledge - The project owner lacks the detailed technical knowledge within the communication industry but they're responsible for ensuring success.
2. Lack of platform knowledge - Whether they have domain expertise or not, they might not fully understand the capabilities of Teams Phone and how it does 'stuff'.
3. Lack of business knowledge - They don't really know what is important for the business from a communication perspective. Their safety net is "just deploy what is already there then nothing bad can happen".
4. Overreaching Assumptions - This is a disease within IT at epidemic proportions. Where they make unilateral decisions of what and how something is deployed and given to the users without involving stakeholders in the selection and decision making process. "I am IT, I know what my users want". Except you don't, sorry.

Handling The Knowledge Gap

This really starts at the very beginning of the 'sell'. Not handling the knowledge gap in the first customer meeting is the number one reason why you lose the deal from the customer and makes them look at other solutions.

The first question isn't "how many users do you have?" it's "tell me about you, how you operate, and what your ambitions are with this project?".

Being able to understand at high level the as-is and to-be states the customer has/wants will help drive the conversation and ultimately sale.

My job is to translate what the customer is looking for into what that would look like in a Teams Phone environment and to note down areas that need to be discussed further because they require some cultural or procedural changes.

Then its about envisioning with them how they would operate in the new world, explaining the subtle differences between how they operate now, to how they will eventually operate in Teams.

There are gaps between how the customer wants Teams to work in a certain way and how Teams actually works. My job is to smooth those edges as much as possible.

For this it is not about saying "No", you can't do that. Sometimes the answer really is No, but those 'No's' need to be for the small trivial, nice to have, but can live without things, like being able to login to a Teams desk phone on behalf of someone.

Its about interviewing the customer to find out if the feature is actually used or even needed in the new world.

Let me give you some examples.

Extension Dialing

100% this is the most ASKED question I get from customers moving from PBX/VoIP to Teams. Why? Because that's fundamentally how those systems work.

Unlike Teams where the user is the device identity, with PBXs the device is the identity and the user is a user of that device. The device's identity is its extension number.

The extension number is its unique identifier in its calling partition where DIDs can be routed to and other internal phones can dial to reach the user assigned the device.

What they are really asking...

They just want to be sure that people will be able to call people internally without having to remember their DID.

With Teams the user account of the person is their unique identifier within Teams. The Teams device (client) is tuned to search for and dial an internal person by name or email address.

Their number doesn't matter, therefore, extension numbers are irrelevant.

But you'll be thinking, what about shared service extensions? Shared service extensions are highly memorable internal extensions that people dial to access a service like IT support, Finance, HR etc. for example: 5555 calls IT.

The good news is Teams will allow you to maintain this quick dial capability. There are a few options that can be used either together or instead of.

1. Use a dial plan normalization rule to catch the quick dial pattern and translate it to the phone number assigned to the target
2. Name your service accounts in a way that is easily found
3. Add your service accounts to your global address list
4. Instruct users to add these to their personal speed dials so they become one click call
5. Use a voice enabled auto attendant with directory search capability where the users can call and say "Satya Nadella" to be connected to them.

Shared Line Appearances

Shared Line Appearance is a traditional cost saving strategy in the telephony world. DID's (PSTN direct inward dial numbers) cost money. In the UK these can be in the pence per month in rental, but in other countries, quite expensive (especially in Asia).

To limit the cost of number rental, businesses usually had less DID's than user extensions. Only users who absolutely needed a direct dial number would be assigned, the rest could use a single number identity when they're calling external.

Shared Line Appearance is where it appears to the callee that multiple callers are calling from the same number.

There has been mis-information in the industry that Teams doesn't support shared line appearance until recently when Microsoft announced Shared Calling.

Teams has supported Shared Line Appearance since the very beginning. However, it has only been supported through Direct Routing until recently when Shared Calling came out.

Shared Calling allows you to share a Microsoft calling plan and common number for outbound calling with thousands of users.

Shared calling is also available with some Operator Connect partners, of which Momemtum are one.

So now, no matter what PSTN connectivity option you choose, shared line appearance is an option for you.

What about callback?

Users assigned a shared line appearance can be called back from external via an auto attendant or switchboard operator. All you need to do is assign the shared number with the appropriate resource account to provide a call back path.

Microsoft went even further with full E-911 compliance for shared line callers. Not only in an emergency are their location broadcast to the answering point, but a direct call back path is established using dedicated numbers reserved explicitly for such scenario.

Mute PSTN Calls

We all know about Teams presence and when you're in a DND state, all calls get forwarded to voicemail.

However, there is a productivity scenario where in some cases, users want to mute incoming calls to their phone, but still let it audibly ring when the caller is internal.

With traditional platforms, you'd enable this on your phone and when an external call came in to it from external your line would flash but you wouldn't be disturbed with a ringer. You could take the call if you wished, but more often than not you'd let it silently forward to voicemail.

PBX vendors will tell you that its not possible to mute PSTN calls in Teams.

They are right and wrong at the same time.

The feature isn't enabled by default, but in the Calling Policy of Teams there is a setting that allows you to forward pstn calls. Set this to 'Let users decide' and then they have the ability to toggle on this feature on demand.

Redirect to voicemail is self explanatory, redirect as is the call is unanswered essentially issues a cancel / decline message so the call never even rings.

Internal and federated calls are still permitted and will ring.

So while Teams CAN stop external calls from reaching you on-demand, it doesn't mute the call. The subtle difference is that the Teams user has no option to accept the call, whilst the PBX user would be visually notified and able to choose to answer or not.

However, in most cases the default is to let it to ring out to voicemail, so the common use case is covered by Teams. It just cuts out the time needlessly ringing for the caller.

Multicast Messaging / Paging

There are more advanced phone features that some specialist organizations use. For example in a hospital, specialist care or education environment where there are internal emergencies to handle.

Phones need a panic button, when pressed all phones ring and play the emergency message "Employee needs help in consultation room 1" for example.

Other examples are audible reminders. In care homes when medication must be given out at a certain time of the day, sending an audible tone to phones that signals the time is now is used.

Out of the box Teams Phone can't help, but this is where the power of the ecosystem of solution partners comes into play.

Microsoft partnered with Algo who are a specialist in paging solutions and they have worked together to provide this capability

Door Intercoms and Access Systems

Door access systems are usually connected to your PBX using SIP registration. When pressed, a phone (or group of phones) ring and once the caller has been authenticated, you press a button on your phone to release the door lock.

How this works is quite simple, its just a phone call between two endpoints. The intercom itself is connected to a control board and actuator and when it receives the correct DTMF tone from the far end, that triggers a signal to the control board to initialize the actuator that opens the door lock.

These will work with Teams and nothing to be afraid of.

Some might be supported for Teams' SIP Gateway which is a way to register generic SIP devices directly to Teams so they have their own Teams account. Others require a certified interop device such as an ATA that can interface between the intercom and register itself on behalf of the intercom to the Teams SIP Gateway.

If that's not an option, there are other connectivity options available to bring these devices into your Teams environment and integrate with them.

Advanced Delegate Call Handling

Teams does Boss/Admin, Call Delegation pretty well. Originally it was just the ability to make and receive a call on behalf of a nominated person, but now extends to being able to manage the call settings of the user as well.

People that use call delegation tend to also be the people who use Teams Phones. The mid range Teams phones offer expansion modules that allow delegates to manage multiple lines easily.

There are some situations where the current PBX delegation can appear more advanced and going to Teams call delegation is seen as a step backwards.

This is rarely seen, but where you have 1 delegate managing 10-15 bosses' calls it can their Teams phone will be constantly ringing!

Usually the secretary / admin assistant will not want to intercept the call straightaway. Instead they want to be notified there is a caller on one of their boss lines, but they want to give the boss a chance to answer that call direct.

During this time, they don't want their phone to audibly ring, but to notify them with flashing line with an option to pick up the call should they wish.

The out of the box Teams delegation feature allows you to set some call privileges to the delegates:

• Make and receive calls
• Receive calls
• No Calls

The nuance here is that when the delegation is set to include receiving calls, the delegates phone will ring immediately when calls arrive at the bosses'

To in the situation where the admin doesn't want to be overly disturbed by calls to boss lines when you compare PBX feature behaviour to Teams, you can easily assume that this is one negative towards choosing Teams phone.

Wrong.

Whilst the delegate behaviour alone falls short in delivering this experience, you can re-create the desired result in Teams with little additional configuration effort.

Instead you add the delegate as the boss's admin as normal and set their behaviour to make/receive calls if they need to call on behalf of the boss and admin their call settings.

But in addition, you create a call group on the boss's account and add the admin to that group.

When you add them, you select the notification to Mute.

Then you just need to configure the boss's call answering settings to call their pickup group either simultaneously or after set number of seconds.

Now the delegate gets the delegation features and gets silently alerted when a call comes into their boss which they can choose to pickup, or ignore.

Summary

I hope that some of these scenarios I've shared are useful to you and demonstrate that Teams Phone is a robust, modern calling platform that can deliver every modern day calling feature need.

Of course there will be someone somewhere who's total requirements cannot all match up to Teams features for whatever reason.

To those people, I challenge you to think about whether you actually need that feature or whether you can adapt to fit within the parameters of what Teams Phone offers.

Many times I have seen customers pivot their entire solution to a product that does the one thing a minority needs, only to find that in doing so opened pandora's box on everyone else and caused a bigger problem in the end.

Never short sight yourself.

Let me know what interesting problems you've come across and how you solved (or didn't) with Teams.