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Microsoft Teams Blog
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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

50 Comments

  • PaulMGregory's avatar
    PaulMGregory
    Copper Contributor

    This looks like a great addition to the platform, and the start of a realistic solution for a basic Contact Centre.

     

    I'm sure it will develop over time (see the second note about additional capabilities coming after launch) and I think that this will be interesting for those who have a need for these capabilities.

     

    Requiring an additional licence seems reasonable, it's an advanced feature set that not everyone will need. Teams Premium offers a lot of other capability that isn't relevant here, but the cost of the add-on isn't that high. I think back to the cost of adding Contact Centre capabilities to Avaya platforms, Elite Agent IDs and CMS, there's always an add-on cost for add-on capability.

     

    Looking forward to trying it out in my demo tenant, I just need to convince someone to pay for the additional licenses now (the irony is not lost on me).

  • Andre_Hagmann's avatar
    Andre_Hagmann
    Copper Contributor

    This is great progress for the upcoming Queue Apps, But what is missing in the App and Roadmap are the following feature

    1. Full Management of Holiday (Add/Move/Delete) and assign to AA (incl. Announcements Assignments)

    2. Call Transfer consistent experience > Direct Transfer is based on Calling, but the consultative Call is based with Chat (default) option

     

    I also agree with other posts, that this fundamental features should be covered by the MS Teams Phone Standard License and NOT with the premium license.

     

     

     

  • MPD's avatar
    MPD
    Copper Contributor

    Great to see continuous development on this app. A long-awaited features like authorised user CQ management etc. But I not all of it should be a premium feature. The authorised users (leads) ability to freely manage their team, call queues and auto attendants based on business needs should be definitely included in the base configuration.

  • Fabian_Loosli's avatar
    Fabian_Loosli
    Copper Contributor

    Happy to see this new features coming to Teams Phone System. Will there be an option for people with delegated Admin Permissions (leads) to create Holidays and to change the call greetings of Holidays?

  • arnebo's avatar
    arnebo
    Copper Contributor

    Finally! This is great stuff! And all the other features you get with Teams Premium, incl. "Intelligent Recap" for PSTN - this is a must have for agents!

  • Alex Appleton's avatar
    Alex Appleton
    Brass Contributor

    This should be basic functionality included with Teams.  Why make it a premium feature?

  • Wonder why you mention calling plans. That is money out the window. You can get Direct Routing much cheaper. There are lot's of providers that gives you better price for Teams Phone that Microsoft does with their Calling Plans.  

    Why not look into third party solutions like Tendfor or Landis? They do more or less the same, and in Tendfor you will just be able to have one Teams Phone number for one queue and not for the whole company. Might be something to save money on 🙂

  • CloudUser2323's avatar
    CloudUser2323
    Brass Contributor

    A separate license? This is basic functionality that should be included out of the box with Teams Phone Standard.  It's already £26 a user for Phone Standard and Intl/Domestic Calling per user on top of £23 per month for 365 Biz Premium so £49, without basic call center functionality.   To add to this, your competitors like 8x8 and Ring Central come in far cheaper and integrate with Teams.  

  • Unfortunate to see that this requires an additional license.  Some of these basic queue's features should already be in the base product (like allowing to enable/disable who is in the queue)