Blog Post

Microsoft Teams Blog
3 MIN READ

Introducing the Queues app: Enabling customer engagement in Microsoft Teams

BinduPillai's avatar
BinduPillai
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Mar 26, 2024

Every employee in the modern workplace has the potential to be an ambassador for customer engagement. Whether they work in sales, service, health care, or finance, these ambassadors prefer using familiar tools such as Microsoft Teams to simplify their customer communication and care workflows.


Today, we are excited to announce the Queues app, a Teams-native solution that empowers organizations to efficiently manage customer engagements, starting with calls.

 

Efficient customer engagement

Powered by Teams Phone, the Queues app enables team members to make and receive customer calls without having to leave Teams, with tailored experiences for users and leads that are designed for efficiency in call handling and resolution.

 

Upon opening of the Queues app, users immediately get a 360 view of their call queue performance through real-time statistics. The app makes it easy for members to opt-in or out of call queues based on these statistics, their availability, and business needs. When opted-in, members can receive call notifications for their respective queues, all without leaving Teams. Upon acceptance of a call, members can also see relevant customer profile information from their CRM tool in a browser popout side-by-side, as configured by the organization. This allows members to quickly get context of the call whenever possible. By leveraging Copilot¹ to summarize call notes users can save time between customer engagements.

 

Improved customer outcomes through collaborative call handling
Designed for collaborative call handling, the Queues app helps team members and leads to work together on answering calls and facilitates teamwork between a close-knit group of people. Calling or chatting with your team members is one click away. It also brings the most relevant call controls, such as call transfer, front and center to help speed up the process of reaching out to someone when expert advice is needed or if there is an escalation.

 

Team members can place outbound calls on behalf of the call queues or auto attendants so that they can show up as a team for customers. Users can also document information from calls to inform future customer interactions on their voice enabled channels.

 

A secure, reliable and easy-to-manage customer care solution
Managing call queues was once an exclusive privilege of Teams administrators, which often slowed down improvements for customer operations. With the Queues app, authorized users (leads) can now freely manage their team, call queues and auto attendants based on business needs.

 

Leads have access to a comprehensive analytics dashboard of real-time and historical reporting² out of box that helps speed decisioning and improvements.

 

Future Queues app functionality will help leads improve team performance by leveraging call Monitor, Barge, Whisper and Takeover functionality.²

 

Leads have delegated admin capabilities that allow for adding and removing queue members, changing the call handling flows, configuring auto-attendant greetings and more.

 

Great customer engagement starts with Teams
The Queues app equips your team to handle customer calls within Teams, enabling more efficient and collaborative support, faster call resolution, and happier customers. The app is designed for compliance and governance and is built with the reliability and security of Microsoft 365.


The Queues app will be available as part of Teams Premium in Q4 2024. 

1. Copilot in Teams Phone supports VoIP and PSTN calls and requires Copilot for Microsoft 365 license.
2. These capabilities are planned after launch.
3. Users should be licensed for Teams Phone for the preview. 

Updated Jul 29, 2024
Version 2.0