We are a small business with 10 users and use Teams Phone with Operator Connect. It works great and we love it, but when it comes to call queues we are really struggling.
There's a few issues that we have that from what I understand, can only be solved with 3rd party add-ons:
1) I have it set to do the attended routing I believe it is, where it should ring all members of the queue. I have presence based routing turned off. 80% of the time when someone calls the queue, it only rings one user from my staff. No one else has their Teams ring. He will message that someone is on hold or looking for someone else, and everyone is always surprised as most times it just doesn't ring anyone.
2) Whenever it does ring everyone, if you miss the "Call answered by John Smith" in the notification, there's absolutely no way to know if someone got the call or is on it. Presence is always slow, so you can't trust the red icon or "In a call", plus it doesn't even say if it's "In a queue call" vs just a direct call making it not helpful. We used to use 3CX and had a whole switchboard app that would let you see the callers waiting in the queue, how long, who is available, who answered a call, who is talking, etc.
3) Even when a call ends, it's really difficult to view details on it. The built in reports seem bad, and everyone says use Power BI but that's so clunky just to be able to quickly log in and see "did anyone from the team answer that call or was it abandoned, and who answered it."
4) Our biggest issue is the lack of visibility into anything. No one has any way of telling if someone is in a queue or on hold or anything. We use the option where we assign a Teams channel as the queue to make it appear in Teams, but even that is useless. That only shows calls the user answered, and not ALL queue calls. I'm an admin so I don't take calls, yet if I go into any Teams channel for a queue it's completely empty and shows nothing, making that also useless.
I know there's several 3rd party add-ons, but our biggest issue is that we might get 1 call a day if that. It's very minimal, but when we do get one we like to see details on it. Some solutions were $75 USD a user a month, which is more than I pay for all of Microsoft 365 and Teams Phone for a user, so it's hard to justify.
Are there any 3rd party add ons that are a bit better but that won't break the bank? Not looking for free or trying to be cheap, it's just hard to justify based on our usage. If not, I'm almost debating on having it so that when a user presses 1 for Sales for example, it just sends it to an external DID where I can use 3CX or something again instead or via Direct Routing even though that's clunky.
We LOVE everything else about Teams Phone, it's just call queues are SO brutal to use!
