Engage customers with Teams Phone Agent and custom voice agents built in Copilot Studio

It’s often difficult for businesses to serve every customer right away during surges in call volumes. Callers sit on hold while staff race to work through the backlog. Meanwhile, agentic voice AI is opening entirely new ways to serve customers, such as getting answers to questions or even enabling them to pay a bill over the phone, including after hours and on weekends.

We are excited to announce Teams Phone Agent, along with the ability to bring custom voice agents your organization builds in Microsoft Copilot Studio to Microsoft Teams Phone.         

For customer-facing organizations using Teams Phone, like healthcare clinics or bank branches, these agents take repetitive calls off the plate of employees so they can focus on the conversations that truly need a human touch. All this enables faster issue resolution for customers.

How Teams Phone Agent works

Teams Phone Agent greets callers and resolves common requests with these skills.

• Questions and Answers: Using configured knowledge bases that support file uploads and URLs, Teams Phone Agent answers callers' questions in natural conversation, so customers get answers quickly instead of being placed on hold or hunting through a website.
• Appointment scheduling: Teams Phone Agent enables callers to book new appointments, reschedule or cancel existing ones, and find upcoming appointment details so customers can lock in a time without playing phone tag.
• Conversational Routing with intelligent transfers: Teams Phone Agent supports the same tried and tested routing from traditional auto attendants, such as user or extension lookup and transfer to a user, call queue, and more through conversation. When additional assistance is needed, Teams Phone Agent passes the caller along with the full context of the conversation to the right individual or department. Customers can skip cumbersome phone menus and don’t have to repeat themselves.
• Multilingual: Teams Phone Agent supports multilingual conversations across 60+ supported languages, allowing callers to interact naturally in their preferred language and helping organizations deliver global voice experiences at scale.

Automate what’s unique to your business with Copilot Studio voice agents

When you need to automate processes unique to your business, like letting patients fill a prescription over the phone, custom voice agents that your organization builds in Copilot Studio step in. Teams Phone Agent can seamlessly hand off a call to custom voice agents whenever those specialized skills are needed. Alternatively, you can set things up so customers can dial a Copilot Studio custom voice agent directly through a Teams Phone line.

Voice agents with Teams Phone in action

Here are a few illustrative use cases for how Teams Phone Agent and Copilot Studio voice agents can help organizations engage their customers:

• Answer routine questions without making callers wait. A healthcare clinic can use Teams Phone Agent to answer common questions about hours, locations, accepted insurance, and appointment preparation, helping patients get answers quickly while staff focus on care coordination.
• Book and reschedule appointments over the phone. A home services company can use Teams Phone Agent to help customers schedule, confirm, or change appointments for plumbing or electrical repairs in natural conversation, helping reduce back-and-forth calls and freeing employees from repetitive scheduling work.
• Route customers to the right expert with context. A bank branch can use Teams Phone Agent to understand what type of support a caller needs, such as assistance with completing a mortgage loan application. Teams Phone Agent can then transfer the call to the right team with the conversation context included.
• Complete business-specific tasks with a Copilot Studio voice agent. A pharmacy can use a Copilot Studio custom voice agent to help customers request a prescription refill by phone and check order status, giving customers a simpler way to manage routine needs without waiting for staff assistance.
• Support customers after hours. A utility provider can use a Copilot Studio custom voice agent connected to Teams Phone to let customers report an outage or get billing help outside normal business hours.

An expanding ecosystem of voice agents for Teams Phone

We want customers to have choice across first-party and third-party voice agents. That is why we are working with select solution developers to integrate their voice agents with Teams Phone. AudioCodes is announcing general availability of its voice agent for Teams Phone today, with additional solutions expected in the future.

Get started

Teams Phone Agent and the ability to integrate custom voice agents built in Copilot Studio with Teams Phone are now accessible through the Frontier program. Join Frontier so that your organization can get early access to Microsoft’s latest AI innovations.

Teams Phone admins can set up Teams Phone Agent through Teams admin center. Learn more.

Copilot Studio makers can navigate to Microsoft Copilot Studio to set up a voice agent and then assign it to Teams Phone Agent or a Resource Account to be called directly. Learn more.

Licensing during the Frontier preview

• Teams Phone Agent is available via the Frontier program. Service limitations may apply.
• Custom Copilot Studio voice agent experiences—whether reached through a Teams Phone Agent hand-off or by direct dial—are accessible via the Frontier program and are billed consumptively at a rate based on the orchestration type your organization selects when building the agent in Copilot Studio. Learn more.
• Billing for Copilot Studio voice agent experiences in Teams Phone will roll out by early July, and usage will not be charged prior to this rollout. Service limitations may apply. When the billing experience is rolled out, all Frontier preview users will be required to set up billing to continue using Copilot Studio voice agents for Teams Phone.
• Tenants must also meet standard Teams Phone prerequisites, including a properly configured Teams Phone resource account. Learn more.
• All licensing, pricing, and service limits are subject to change. Additional information will be communicated at general availability.