Ben Love [00:00:00]:
Good morning. Everybody can see people starting to join, which is wonderful. Could I please bother somebody just to drop a quick message in the chat, just letting me know that you can hear me. Okay, fantastic. Thank you, Cassandra. Thank you, Rowan. All right, let’s get underway, shall we, folks? Thank you for joining us this morning. Today we are going to be doing a high level run through an introduction to teams calling, Microsoft Teams calling.

Ben Love [00:00:42]:
So just to put this in some immediate context, this is all about telephony making phone calls. So a quick agenda for today. We’ll touch on some of the current communications challenges that you may be facing in your business. A bit of an introduction to what is Microsoft Teams calling. We’ll run over some of those business benefits and use cases that might be of value to you and very quick check on what an implementation roadmap looks like to bring teams calling online. So the hidden costs of communication chaos. So there’s obviously a range of different telephone systems and telephony that we can use in our businesses. Some of you may still have quite old legacy hardware based platforms, some of you may have more modern VoIP based systems.

Ben Love [00:01:42]:
But one of the things for us to keep an eye on across all of these platforms are these hidden costs in there. There can be those multiple vendors who are involved in simply letting the telephone ring on our desk. There are, there is different phone system providers. If you do still have hardware installed in your office for your telephony, you may have a different provider there who takes care of the physical hardware. There are different collaboration tools obviously that all of our staff use around that as well. Because communication these days is obviously not just telephones. We have things like Microsoft Teams like we’re using now for video calling and everything else there. And then of course add in mobile telephony to the whole conversation as well.

Ben Love [00:02:26]:
Mobile phones, it is another channel through which telephony can all happen. And having all of these disconnected solutions there can simply just bring a little bit of chaos to it all. Now this is an interesting number that I pulled from the Harvest Business review. The average employee spends 9% of their time at work toggling between apps. Now, I am not suggesting that the average employee spends 9% of their time at toggling between telephony apps and communication apps. I think that would be quite a stretch to say that they spent that much of their time doing that. But it does certainly speak to the proliferation of different apps and software and tools that we do have at our disposal these days and how as all of those tools and apps do spread and sprawl, and there are more and more of them. There is a cost in terms of productivity.

Ben Love [00:03:22]:
As we switch back and forth between the apps, one platform and complete communications. This is where teams calling comes in and solves and helps simplify a little bit of that chaos and remove some of those hidden costs. Essentially, Teams Calling is a complete business telephone system. In Microsoft Teams, in that familiar teams environment that we all already use, it has everything you’d expect from a business phone system. Professional business phone numbers. We can bring across your existing phone numbers quite easily. That’s called number porting, by the way. So if you do already have your phone numbers published on your, I was about to say the white pages.

Ben Love [00:04:09]:
I’m not sure anyone uses that much anymore, but published on your website, on business cards, wherever you may have those phone numbers, they will work quite happily. If you bring your telephony into Teams Calling, it has call routing and auto attendance, which are pretty standard features we expect these days. So auto attendance we’re all familiar with. That’s press one for this, press two for that to get routed to the direct team. It has voicemail built in. You get written transcriptions of those voicemails, which personally I think is pretty cool. And we’ve also got a number of call recording and compliance features built into the platform there. And that’s even before we start talking about all of the third party add ons that you can add on to teams calling if you do have more specific requirements, such as running call centers or advanced call reporting or any of those sort of things.

Ben Love [00:05:01]:
Plus of course, everything that Microsoft Teams has to offer already, independently of whether you add teams calling into your teams, that seamless transition from calls to video meetings, the instant messaging, the text chat, file sharing, real time collaboration, and of course that deep integration into the rest of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. This is a quick check on the evolution of business telephony over the years. Back in the day, we had separate hardware, so there was a physical box, at least one physical box, often actually numerous and multiple, that would be mounted somewhere within your office, which was your phone system, and there were physical cables running from that out to the physical handsets on the desktop. Now these days it’s really all cloud based. There is no hardware that we need to install in an office location per se. We’re getting down to that single Microsoft relationship again by bringing that telephony within teams. It’s simplifying those number of external relationships that we need. Traditional telephony telephone systems had limited integration as well.

Ben Love [00:06:17]:
As we’re seeing now with this unified communication with telephony really just being brought into the the main Microsoft 365 platform, there is native integration on a whole lot of different points there. Between your telephone system now in teams calling and all of the other bits and applications that you may use, whether they’re within Microsoft 365 apps or other add on applications, which we’ll talk about in a minute, There is no complex user training because this is all within the familiar teams interface. This is actually a pretty important point. Your people are probably already using Microsoft Teams for a lot of their communication with video calls. And just like this one we’re having this morning, it’s the same app, it’s the same interface, so they’re already familiar with how to use it and navigate around it. So the training requirements are honestly quite negligible. You can work for anywhere, work from anywhere with this. And again, that’s just because it’s a cloud based app.

Ben Love [00:07:18]:
As with all of the Microsoft 365 suite, it’s all cloud based. So you can be sitting in your office, you can be working from home, a client site, whatever the case may be, and you will have full functionality. There is no sacrifice in functionality for you to not be working physically from a particular Office location. Couple of points here about why teams calling can make sense in that business environment. There is no more app switching, so that context is preserved. I’ve already touched on that. Scalability, as with all of these cloud based things, scalability is effectively infinite. We can add users to the system very quickly and easily.

Ben Love [00:08:04]:
So if you have a new staff member join the team if they need an Office phone number and to be part of that Office telephony there, it’s very quick and easy to add them to the system. That professional image, obviously you have all the professional functionality there with the call routing and auto attendance and advanced features there. The simplified management is actually really quite a useful one. Phone systems, you know, the more legacy phone systems could be honestly pretty funky to administer. You know, you really had to know what you were doing behind the scenes there to work them out. Teams calling is really a lot simplified there. It is all within one admin portal. Now most of our clients, in fact, dare I say all of our clients, have us administer their teams calling environment anyway.

Ben Love [00:08:52]:
So this is probably not something that we’ll directly impact you. But of course because it allows us to be so much more efficient with how we administer that team’s calling for you, obviously things get done quicker, easier Et cetera. So everybody wins and future ready. So being a cloud based application, Microsoft are constantly releasing new features, fixing issues, evolving the product on a. On a. On a near real time basis sometimes. Which means that it will always be current per se. There are no hardware refresh cycles.

Ben Love [00:09:28]:
You know you’re not purchasing it now and in three years time you have to purchase an upgrade to get the latest features there as well. There’s some examples of really use cases that are pretty powerful in my opinion. Customer service there that click to call from your CRM. So if you do have a CRM system in place, all of the better ones will do this. We personally use HubSpot here, grassroots it for our CRM here. It has that click to call functionality which means you can for us in HubSpot we can simply find the contact we want to call, click a button and teams calling will leap into action and dial that that person. It can also happen the other way around. When an incoming call comes through into teams, it can pop up that particular person’s contact record within within your CRM.

Ben Love [00:10:32]:
So that functionality both ways can be extremely effective and efficient, particularly for customer service reps, SDRs on outgoing outbound call campaigning, that sort of stuff where there’s a lot of numbers or they need to really have access in the CRM to whoever’s on the other line other end of that phone call. Sales teams really love this. They can call directly from those Outlook contacts. It is very, very quick to again similar to the CRM integration, but again within Outlook you just click the contact, click the button and a telephone call will be initiated to that person. And all those calls are automatically log as well within the team system there. So for anyone on your sales team who needs to keep track of the calls that they’re making for whatever reason, it’s all automatically logged and it’s all really quick and easy to see there, which makes life a lot easier for your salespeople. Remote working, as I said before, because it is all cloud based, you can have unfettered access to teams calling irrespective of your location. All you need is an Internet connection and a device of some sort such as your laptop or your mobile phone or your desktop computer.

Ben Love [00:11:55]:
If you would like to work from a physical desk phone, a telephone handset that you pick up and hold up to your head, that is perfectly okay. That is absolutely a valid thing that teams call and will still support quite happily in practice. We find really most clients are not using physical handsets these days. They really do simply use Their computer with the Teams app and a headset just like I’ve got on now. That’s really how most people are interacting with their telephony these days, more so than that traditional physical handset. So if you have remote workers, if you have staff working from home or from client sites or on the road or. The other scenario I’ll point out too is if you have multiple physical offices essentially, that can all simply be part of the one phone system. It simply does not matter where the person is sitting that may be answering a phone call or making a phone call.

Ben Love [00:12:55]:
It works anywhere as long as you have that Internet connection in place. Meeting integration we’ve touched on this is really connecting in with the core functionality of Microsoft. Teams around meetings and video calling and so on. And the mobile workforce is a really good one to call out. I touched on it a bit when I was talking about remote work. But we all have the. You can’t see my phone. We all have the Teams app on our mobile phones.

Ben Love [00:13:27]:
Now, Teams calling is part of the Teams app whether the Teams app is on your laptop or on your mobile phone. So you can have somebody with their mobile phone, but they are answering phone calls that were from their work phone number and they are making outbound calls through their work phone number. And it is a fully integrated experience on their mobile phone. So if for some reason you need somebody using a mobile phone, but you essentially want to obfuscate or hide their mobile phone number, for example, and just have them use an office phone number, this is the way to do it. It’s very easy, it works very well. It’s very effective. Being Microsoft, of course, this whole thing is extremely secure. End to end encryption on anything.

Ben Love [00:14:19]:
The advanced threat protection features that are built into the Microsoft 365 platform from the ground up, it is compliant or can be compliant with all of the relevant security standards that you yourself might be subject to. Soc2, HIPAA and GDPR, not so much in Australia, depending on where you’re doing those admin controls. We do have a lot of control over what we can do on the back end. There are call recording. We can do call recording on the app and manage that under policies, data retention and of course all the auditing logs and reporting. As I said, this is even before we start to touch on third party add on tools to teams calling, which can give you even greater functionality. If you run a call center, for example, there are add ons to teams calling which will give you fantastic visibility into your call queues, your answer times, your drop Rates all of the important information that you need when running an effective call center, just as one example. So transitioning to teams calling, it is a very straightforward process, can I say.

Ben Love [00:15:29]:
So a typical timeline there, week one and two of the project is planning and user setup. Week three and four, the number porting in the go live now, that timeline there, in all honesty, that timeline can be compressed significantly, you know, if need be. The one piece in that picture, though, that can sometimes take a little bit longer and that is unfortunately outside of our control is the number porting. So for number porting, that’s when you have existing phone numbers that you wish to keep using. So we need to port them across into the new team’s calling system and we are at the mercy of the telcos really as to how quickly they will do that. We will manage the whole process on your behalf, but that bit is just outside of our control on the timing. Training requirements are minimal. It quite simply is the familiar teams app that you are currently using on your computer or that you might have on your mobile phone, there is just a numeric keypad which will appear in there in the right place that you can use to dial phone numbers or you can just find existing contacts that you have within your system there.

Ben Love [00:16:40]:
Click on a contact and a call will be initiated. The training requirements for staff, honestly they are negligible, but we are absolutely happy to help with any training that you think you may need and of course we will support you doing that whole transition so Grassroots has done. I’m not sure how many, but many migrations across to teams calling. We have the process down pat and we will be there every step of the way to to help you along the way. So a quick offer for everybody here today. If you think teams calling may be of interest to you, we are quite happy to do a comparison for you and essentially do you a quote to do that and to make it realistic or accurate, could you please send us a copy of your most recent telephone bill because from that we will be able to look at the volume of calls you make, how many phone numbers you have. There’s just a few bits of information on that existing phone bill which let us properly scope up a teams calling solution to suit your requirements. So if that is of interest to you, please just drop us an email with your latest phone bill to inquiriesassrootsit or benassrootsit.com or whoever your contact is here and we’ll make that happen for you.

Ben Love [00:17:59]:
Not a problem at all. If anybody would actually like a hands on demonstration of teams calling too. Also, please reach out. More than happy to line you up with that. It is a very straightforward system. There is no mystery about it. We all know how telephones work. The real magic of this is just bringing it within teams.

Ben Love [00:18:15]:
So it’s all there in a single app, in a single unified interface. Thank you everybody. That is the end of my TED Talk for today. I hope that was of value to some of you who may have curiosity about teams calling. As I said, if you would like to continue the conversation at all, please reach out. And we are happy to answer any, any questions you may have, provide you with a quote or so on. Thank you. Have a wonderful day.