This post is about the Contact Center Integration in Microsoft Teams. If you deploy Microsoft Teams calling capabilities to enable your workforce to use Microsoft Teams you might also be interested in the Contact Center integration. In the past I wrote an article about Microsoft Teams Call Queues and Auto Attendants for Direct Routing which describes Teams calling capabilities in regards of automatic call distribution (ACD) and/or interactive voice response (IVRs). Depending on your needs this was and is maybe not yet sufficient for your agents because you have many agents answering loads of incoming calls, transfer calls to maybe other departments/agents and respond to these incoming requests, complaints, remote advisories, incidents or what have you. Maybe 24/7…

So, there was a missing piece to bringt Microsoft Teams and more advanced Contact Center solutions together. Until lately. APIs were enhanced and improved which enabled Contact Center solution and service providers to build and use the available integrations based on

• Direct Routing Connectivity,
• Microsoft Graph Cloud Communication APIs,
• Teams platform and extensibility and/or
• Teams SDKs.

By this Microsoft enables for three integration “depths”:

• Connect | based on Direct Routing
• Connect and Extend | mixture of Direct Routing + Graph APIs + Teams apps platform
• Extend and Power |embedding Teams SDKs into Contact Center App/Solution/Service for native Teams interactions (which works with Direct Routing as well as calling plans)

Now that you want to start to integrate your existing Contact Center solution in Microsoft Teams, note that this works only for certified Contact Center solutions and services, which are listed in the Connected Contact Center for Microsoft Teams Certification Program. Today, there are already very well-known providers offering Microsoft Teams integration (see additional resources).

Conclusion, opinion and summary

This is another step forward to bring in more voice and calling capabilities into Microsoft Teams as it can become the primary client app for Contact Center agents as well. I assume that more is about to come and enable companies to leverage more and more of Microsoft Teams especially enterprises with large contact centers which might still be on Skype for Business Server with Enterprise Voice for these workloads. In the past this was mostly due to the SFB UCMA integration which was often used in these voice deployments and in Teams this integration option was missing. Now, enterprise still running SFB Server and having dependencies in regards of third-party Contact Center solutions based on UCMA might probably soon get rid of SFB Server onprem, migrate (the until now left behind Contact Center agents) to Microsoft Teams and decommission SFB Server infrastructure.

Additional resources

• Contact Center integrations for Microsoft Teams
• Anywhere365 | https://anywhere365.io/direct-routing-contact-center-for-microsoft-teams/
• ComputerTalk | https://www.computer-talk.com/product/enterprise-contact-center/ice-contact-center-for-teams
• Enghouse Interactive | https://enghouseinteractive.co.uk/microsoft/
• Five9 | https://www.five9.com/products/application-integration/uc-integration
• Genesys | https://www.genesys.com/microsoft
• Luware | https://luware.com/en/solutions/
• NICE inContact | https://www.niceincontact.com/microsoft-teams
• Microsoft Teams Call Queues and Auto Attendants for Direct Routing