MICROSOFT DIRECT ROUTING FOR TEAMS: Using Microsoft Teams for calling.

[Music] check it out i'm sam major commercial director of chrome technologies on this week's edition we'll talk to john ledner pre-sales consultant about the features and benefits of using a direct routing model for calling on microsoft teams john welcome to the podcast thanks for having me sam well you know this is obviously a very relevant topic right now uh given the effects of the pandemic and having pushed many organizations including our own um to adopt this fully remote or hybrid working model uh you know the adoption of touch tools as as teams it's surged over the past 12 to 18 months and i recently i was reading an article and it quoted microsoft for quotations that had grown from 20 million active users from pre-pandemic to 115 million active users and that was as of october last year you know that's what is that 600 nearly best part 600 increase um now that would have grown since then that's last october so we're probably past 600 percent growth by now and you know many businesses as we know adopted teams initially to utilize the the video conferencing element and collaboration capabilities of that tool or other tools like it um and now we're seeing many businesses again including our own they're now utilizing teams for inbound and outbound calling as well um so i guess first question for our audience if you could explain what the options are for using microsoft teams for for business schools okay so yeah first of all sam yeah you're very right we've seen this massive increase uh in the last 12 to 18 months of organizations uh taking teams but what what you're seeing is you're seeing organizations using teams as you say for conferencing meetings internal communications in whatever shape or form but the telephony side of it they're still using the traditional systems and so you're seeing all sorts of of setups where people are having people still in offices diverting calls to mobiles um paying recurring things for phone systems and at this and but at the same time they're using teams so what microsoft has now done is they've incorporated uh telephony functions into teams that allows you to quite literally make and receive phone calls through the team's platform just like you would with a traditional phone on the desk but what's interesting though sam is as i was saying we're seeing these organizations that have adopted teams for one part of the business but not for the television part of the business because there's a lack of information out there and they're unable to make an informed decision as to how best to progress with it so they're not progressing at all okay um so i guess how how do we help them unblock that people that aren't progressing clearly there's some benefits here um of utilizing something you're already investing in um you're mentioning this there's people using different platforms right so people have um what we know traditional kind of pbx telephony versus teams and so they're not making any progress at all how do we how do we break that how do we help people move forward uh and adopt teams more fully i guess two-part question i'll just everyone just confuse them um what the pitfalls of that okay so i think the first thing is um education of um organizations to say um look you've got teams and this is what it can potentially do and i'm sitting down and having conversations with them some organizations are doing a bit of research into it for themselves um and they're going off down the because there's really there's two roads you can go when you're looking at teams and telephony you can either go down which is usually the worst idea the the the road of the least resistance um or you can do the road where you've got to do a bit of research a bit of homework so what you could do for example is if you're already a teams user you could just log on to your your microsoft account and you could just click the button that says microsoft root my calls for me now this is not necessarily the best way to go uh because as we i'm sure we'll discuss it's not the best financial move and also um it only gives you real real basic functionality so what a lot of other companies a lot of organizations are starting to do now is they're starting to use the telephony function of teams that have front-end telephony but in the back end what they're doing is that they're programming it to root the calls um through a preferred network and this is what is known in the industry is direct routing so by using that direct routing function what you're doing is you're still keeping that front-end teams that that front-end that everyone is familiar with but when you make a phone call that phone call is then rooted through your preferred supplier and not only is it rooted through a preferred supplier but you've also got a lot of increased functionality about how those calls are rooted uh who they're rooted with and also you've got increased functionality when those calls are coming in there's a lot more you can you can control through that side of it as well okay so just to talk about functionality there is that things you know like the simple things like ddi's for instance yeah so what we're seeing is when it comes down to the direct routing option um where you you're not giving those calls to microsoft you're actually rooting them through your own preferred supplier what we're finding um with that is that's definitely the the thing that's being adopted by the medium to larger organizations the sorts of organizations that need the control they need the flexibility but at the same time they need to be rooting through certified microsoft partners so that's the freedom that direct routine gives them and by doing that they they they can remove that concern about the the microsoft um uh pre pre-plans and and it gives them as i say give them a lot more control over what they're doing so that that's preferred as i say whether the larger organizations they may have a large head count a lot of employees uh they may have a lot of remote workers or there might be businesses that are making a lot of outbound phone calls or need additional functionality like you would see in a more traditional type phone system i understood understood so i guess uh you know when you're setting up teams you look at the you could take the microsoft plan like you said that's the path to least resistance as it were but there seems to be some pitfalls there so again we talk about some of the podcasts a lot you know proper planning and execution to make sure you get a better result that you could go a guest path for this resistance does it save money i guess people look at microsoft calling plan it's easier to set up but versus a direct routing model is there a cost benefit does that want people to lean that way or is it simply because it's simpler and actually this direct routing model i guess is it commercially better as well you understand this is really one of the most important things that whenever you're considering this move this is the one of the key conversations you want to sit down and talk about so we obviously i talked to a lot of clients about this and and they say to me john what can i expect to happen so what so what for example if you were to go down the microsoft route and say to microsoft please root my calls so what they'll say is like okay that's fine it's and it and it's done in a very much per user per month license so what we'll get to the standard you know licensing platform so it's kind of dovetails into all of that exactly that it's per user per month and what they'll say is right what we'll do is we'll give you the ability to make phone calls and we'll give you 1200 minutes a month so this is all very familiar to us you know we've all got mobile phone contracts or house phone contracts and it and it and it sounds very easy to consume so yeah that will do us um but you need to take that apart and you need to say right well how does that fit my business so it's okay so let's look at 1200 minutes 22 months 22 days the average month working work no it's fair yeah yeah so it works out about 50 minutes how much time so you're let's say for example your contact center and you're making outbound phone calls and you're employing loads and loads of people to make loads and loads of outbound phone calls well you know how much how pleased would the sales director be if the average person was spending about 50 minutes on the phone today even too happy would you so you need to think of yeah things like that so what we did is we did a really an interesting thing where we we put some figures into a spreadsheet and we we created a call center and said right okay here's a contact center 200 members of staff let's put them on the microsoft plan and let's get them making outbound calls and let's get them making calls just slightly over the allowed amount every single day and let's have a look and see what that looks like this is quite interesting well the interesting what we did was we did it by a minute or so and that the phone bill for that make-believe call center was about four grand what was interesting sam is what we then did we said right okay well let's up their productivity by 10 minutes a day you know not a great deal so you're not making 50 minutes again we've got the sales director and he's got an outbound sports center and we're only achieving an hour's activity a day i guess he's still going to be pretty unamused but let's go with but that we did is we turned we turned the dial up and we said instead of it being you know 50 minutes we made it an hour and the phone bill went from and this is routing through microsoft the phone bill went from roughly four grand per month to nine and a half grand a month okay you can see where that goes now you've done a bit of work in this space i know you have but you know the average contact center you know they're all behind dialers and my browser guys are on the phone all day so that could easily be you know 18 36 into 60 000 pounds a month yeah but what's also really really interesting is is the way the microsoft um policies set out the way the plan is set out so what they do is they say okay as just back up a second i was saying there's 1200 minutes thing yeah good um but what they then say is right okay so you and i when we make a phone call with our mobile and we go over the amount of minutes what actually happens for you and i is we get our phone bill comes through at the end of the month and there's your normal amount plus another 50 pence or whatever it is for the additional phone calls you made well what microsoft's done is they've they're using this is a very important thing they're using something called communications credit so what you do is you buy your 1200 minutes for all of your people but then you buy it for whatever better time a bit like a bond where you've got this amount of money sat in a pot with microsoft and what you're basically saying is microsoft if i go over my minutes yep not taking money out of that pot yeah and what you're thinking is bill shock because what you one of your sales directors says let's do a campaign let's do this let's do that and at the end of the month you suddenly discover that your pot is almost empty or even worse you empty the pot halfway through the month yeah and then you can't make any outbound phone calls and someone's trying to get a hold of the fd to top to fill the pot back up so it's the thought of half pay monthly half pay as you go kind of set up it's very it's very confusing and it's stuff like this that's confusing um you know business leaders as as to what to do with rooting through teams yeah direct routing function the way that direct routing is built is traditional you you pay this much to rent the service and if you go over you just get a bit more of a bill at the end of the month and that's the way it should be done okay so if someone has ignored all of this advice and they've gone they've signed up directly to microsoft um calling plan and then they've watched this and then you know thank you john amazing uh you're gonna save lots of money brilliant and then we need to move them to a direct um a rooted i model i guess how do we do that what yeah it's so simple to do so okay for example you are let's say you know joe smith and co they've signed them to um microsoft and they are looking at it anything right okay we've probably not made the right move here let's and they start they want to look at the whole direct routing thing it's you know half the work's done they've they've got teams they've got the because the phone system is a on within teams so you've got teams you've got the phone system bolt on and and everyone's familiar with using it as far as um moving to direct routing is concerned it's really really simple so for a small organization you would quite literally speak to your provider and you'd say i want to um look at direct routing and without getting too technical about it sam it's it's pretty simple stuff you order the service you order the license and then you basically push that um config into teams via powershell uh yep and and so that's now got your outbound and then what you do is the what we call the losing provider the company that you're taking the telephony service from you just transfer the phone numbers from those guys onto your platform and that so that that's how you would move somebody from an existing team set up but obviously if you are completely new to it and you're saying i want to you know i want to go from the ground up and i want to start from scratch yes so you're going to need a microsoft uh office 365 license that includes teams and you're going to need to say you're going to need that bolt on that phone system bolt-on obviously you need an internet connection obviously yeah but so we're going to have one so that gives you the foundations of setting it up okay and then what you can do is you can then look at what direction to go in once you've got teams set up and teams has got the ability to make a phone call and there are two ways of doing this if you are a simple business that has a simple requirement pick the phone up make a phone call and stuff like that then we would set it up as a simple direct routing where we would license each individual user to just make and receive outbound calls however if you're a larger organization that has multiple offices or multiple user types and what i mean by multiple user types you might have 80 of your staff might be sat in an office using pcs and teams and stuff like that but you then might have a mobile workforce you might have a factory workforce with analog phones bolted to the walls and stuff like that you might have multiple offices that all want to dial through one system so if we were to go down that road that would be a bit more complicated and and would involve additional hardware and software we'd look at a device called a session border controller okay and the best the best way to describe that is it's like a gateway and all of the users and all of the equipment all goes through this gateway the session border controller and the session border controller then connects out to that traditional phone network but what it's doing is it's acting as a go between a middle man to root all that stuff out onto onto the um to the public network so that is how you would do the simple setup of it but what's what's really important i can't stress this one enough is plan your solution take the correct advice because what you don't want to be doing you don't want to be going down that thinking oh yeah we just tend to we just make him receive phone calls and you go down the rabbit hole of a rabbit hole and then you realize oh hang on a second we've got this requirement we've got that quiet we've got that requirement yeah and then you are end up having to back up and start again so it's very important in the early stages to take the correct advice and say do i go off on this direction where i just do add basically where you know i'm telling you like you don't actually work for chrome obviously you do so you know all this but this is why we do rdws right that's why we take the time to sit with the customer and do the you know vary now where you want to be understand more pitfalls in between and actually you know do that project plan before we move forwards because if we define what success looks like before we move we should take the right steps to get there like you say you know we've seen many a project historically um where people have kind of wanted to do something have run at it and have gone past a stage gate about thinking about it and like you see everyone pick that unfortunately to do that is to kind of go back and start again you've lost that time you've lost that money and you're no further forward you just get more problems and you'll never you'll never get it back no absolutely but doing the rdw defining what the success criteria and outputs need to be that will ultimately shape the size and shape of the project that we have to undertake to get someone there so i'm reviewing everything we do at chrome is that kind of factual you know sort out the beginning type thing do it once it's measured twice cut once type then exactly why that doesn't apply to my diy it very much does apply to this i'm with you and it's all about that proper planning okay so um just you know i think that actually a couple points you said um how do we manage and this literature competitor talking about it but you've mentioned mobiles now i can see how mobile connected to an internet connection we could use teams designed to call on how do you manage that provider so you still need a telephony a kind of mobile plan provider for mobile phones and so on and then how do you your session border controller is that taking care of the kind of analog phones you still have how do we manage those different requirements there so the session border controller is is you know for for a telephony gig like me is a really interesting bit here i'll try not to be too nerdy and geeky about it it's a fantastic gadget where what you can do is you can get old world a new world and bring them together so and what you'll also find is when it comes down to the per user per license per user per month model as you start scaling up and up and up it no longer becomes financially viable and what i mean is let's say you know hypothetically you've got 10 users and it's 10 pound a month so fine it's you know it's 100 it's it's 100 quid but i'll scream i have to stop and think about it you see that but then when you start scaling that up to a thousand people the ends stepped back and retouched me thinking crikey what am i spending here so what the session border controller allows you to do first of all is get a large population of staff and route them through one device and how it actually works instead of having an individual phone license as it were for each user what you do is all those users go into the session border controller and that session border controller then connects to the telephone network using sip trunks so sip trunks are basically um internet phone lines the best way to describe it's just like a normal phone line but it roots over the internet and they're measured with the amount of phone lines and you can have direct ddis on them and all that sort of stuff so what you might have is you might have a model where you've got a thousand staff the thousand staff need to be able to make a phone call but those thousand staff don't actually make that many phone calls so what yeah so what you don't want is you don't want a thousand licenses that only 10 of them get used a day what you want is you want a thousand users connecting to a session border controller and that session border controller then has 20 citrons connected to it okay so this is a bit like just to put it into my terms more my background but you're looking at concurrent user licensing so we have this many people but we know on any given time 20 of our of our client base would actually be practically making an outbound call in my world actually 20 people be accessing the system but i have 200 people that could but the chance of all 200 people accessing it is never going to happen because of shift work and so on and so forth right so i'm assuming in this case that's what the sip trunk is allowing you to do you're taking you know we could potentially you know have a thousand people let's say but we we know because the shift work and way people work and what not they're never all we're doing at the same time so we can take a bet that you know i'm assuming we have tools where we can measure this as well john you know that only this amount of people ever kind of jump on at the same time building some headroom and then monitor to make sure we're inside the headroom exactly that and what you can also do with that sam is you can flex so say for example you're a seasonal business you can just say right okay well for for 11 months of the year we only need this amount but for one month we need to flex up and we can just you can just get up you can just flex it and bring it up and bring it down so that's one of the fantastic things about the session border controller but what i'll give you another example where you'll have say for example a university or a large school or something like that and what you'll find with an organization like that is they've got as i was saying earlier you've got that 80 workforce modern 20 workforce analog well what the session border controller allows you to do is let's say hypothetically yeah it's a school and you've got all of the the office area but then you've got you you've got like a catering team you've got a maintenance team and then you've got some classrooms that need analog phones for whatever so what what what the session border controller will allow you to do is get the whole team's environment and connect that but get those literally old telephone extensions that old 20 year old telephone extension in the kitchen you can put it on teams and somebody in the office can ring extension one two three four and speak to the kitchen through an analog phone that's been bolted to the wall before teams was invented i'd be honestly john i know and i'm around this all the time it's clearly not my era of speciality but that's actually new to me and it might work for a company we do this daily yeah obviously i don't if not on telecom on a daily basis but that's news to me so i wouldn't be surprised if it's news to some of our exact same platforms that they can do that because i you know rightly wrong but obviously wrongly have assumed as you put there the teams is kind of the new side of it yeah and i i would not have made the assumption that i could bring into my estate partner phone system and then the older handsets and whatnot and yeah be able to call to them and have some functionality there so i think people can understand that we can do that that you can mix environments and you know piecemeal approach almost to evolving uh you know systems that will open people's eyes you want you're absolutely right i think that's going to be out of all the stuff we've talked about cost savings clearly's interest and cost savings but that functionality element and not having to rip and replace everything at once i think that's really going to resonate it's an interesting point it's a brilliant point absolutely so any i guess you know what time's like and you and i can talk so we'll go on forever anything else you can impart on our audience just around obviously direct reason over microsoft clearly sounds like it's a no-brainer straightforward to set up um any other benefits that can be delivered with direct routing that we should kind of air now that our audience would you know find a value definitely there are a whole host of different functions and benefits uh with regards to direct routing and also other little bits and bobs that you can do through whether it's direct routing or with teams that people aren't necessarily aware of so but for direct routing one one of the big things is always what happens to our old phone numbers so it's really really simple it's it's obviously really important that somebody know that knows what they're doing ports those phone numbers for you because a lot of organizations out there they've had that phone number for 20 years everyone's got it saved everyone knows you don't want to lose your phone numbers so um with the direct routing function yeah it's really really simple you can very easily not only port all that the main numbers away you can port all of your ddis into direct routing and you can also point all of those ddis to individual users and you can do all types of crazy things where you could say if someone calls me from a manchester phone number route them to my manchester office if someone calls us from a london phone number rooting them to our london office if they call me at 5pm do this if they call me at 5am do that and you can so you can keep all of those numbers and root them in all different ways shapes and forms but not only that you've also got the managerial the managerial and the reporting side of things you can start looking at the way that you are handling calls your productivity and your call patterns and behaviors what time do we get our most calls so we can you can put more stuff in or reduce stuff depending on what time calls are coming in and what are our people actually doing how long does it take them to answer the phone how long are people hanging on for how long are they on hold for um what was the outcome of the call and that the old chestnut the average handling time how quickly do sales you know pick up the phone how quickly do the faults department fix something so you've got all that side of it as well and there's also the great advantage of it can be just a software-based solution headset on there's no there's no need for any disruption and cost of hardware that that's a very you know attractive point regarding it dr look at disaster recovery you know if something goes wrong you know you and i we can just get our laptops and go and sit in a coffee shop and start answering the phone what did we all do last march john we all painted my laptops and went home and went homeless we've not you know worked absolutely fine in that time so yeah but what would happen if we had if we had a physical phone and the it department said oh take this physical phone home where's your story where's your dad huge liner where's your printer i'll be having a cat5 cable running up the staircase and the other thing with direct routine this is a really important one i'm very passionate about is you're getting support what happens it's it's your phones if a laptop dies you know what a laptop dies will be all right but if the phones go off then you you've switched off from the outside world and you need to be able to go to your supplier and say guys i've got a fault help and and having that peace of mind of that uk based 24 7 support where they can help you if something happens you know it's it's not you know and i know sam it's it's not you know if it happens and it's when it happens and it's always where what you don't always yeah and and and the mark of a great company is not if something breaks is how quickly they fix it 100 100 so that's just some of the benefits no listen that's fantastic and you know uh i've certainly learned some things on this podcast that bring i'm sure our audience won't as well so thank you john it's been really interesting um you know so i understand the different features benefits and then it's obvious why people move to teams now from a traditional pbx based solution and looking at session board controls and so on i can now understand how that would do that for customers so really informative really interesting yeah thank you very much joining us no problem great talking to you sam brilliant and thank you for joining us on this week's edition of chromecast if there's any likes to cover in a future episode then please leave that in comment section below and leave a like comment subscribe and share and join us again for chromecast take [Music]

2021-05-09 04:56

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