New to teams: Are multiple outgoing sales lines possible?
Hey everyone! I am the sys admin of my small law firm, and we officially switch to Teams and Microsoft as a phone provider on September 15th. Currently we use 3cx as our PBX and Callcentric as our provider. Most everything is already set up, and waiting for the port. I already have a reception and incoming sales queue set up with a main auto attendant, basically cloning what we have now. We are noticing that our main phone line is being marked as spam when we call out, likely due to it being our main line and our sales dept is going gangbusters. It was suggested we buy multiple sales lines and switch the number our salesperson is dialing from every so often. What I am wondering is: If we purchase a handful of these numbers, is there an easy way to switch what the outgoing number of our salesperson/sales team/sales queue is showing on outgoing calls and is there a way to have incoming calls from each of those numbers funnel into our incoming sales queue, which is often populated with at least two people? For reference, we will no longer be using 3cx after the 15th so everything is under MS's roof. I also asked copilot hoping it would have some insight, but Im not entirely sure if it understood my situation. Any help is appreciated.
Delay transferring out from auto attendant
We have been testing Teams with Direct Routing trunks provided by a carrier partner. All inbound and outbound calls direct to/from Teams users connect without issue. We are using the Teams apps on Windows and iOS - no deskphones are involved yet. I have a simple auto attendant set up which greets the caller with the text-to-speech feature, and then transfers to a queue. This queue plays the default music on hold while alerting queue members. The problem I have is that a caller will dial the number associated with the auto attendant, the call will be answered within a couple of seconds, and then immediately the greeting will be read out and the user will be transferred to the call queue. There is then a silent period of between 5-10 seconds before the music on hold for the queue is heard - this varies with each call, at the lower end it's an acceptable delay, but when it gets to 10s of silence it really isn't workable. If I set the routing on the call queue to put the caller back into the auto attendant after a wait period this happens without any silence - the maximum wait period for the queue is reached and the greeting is played as soon as the music on hold ends. I am not able to determine whether the delay is happening within the auto attendant as it just waits after playing the greeting, or whether it's an issue at the start of the call queue. I opened a support ticket and was told that this delay is expected behavior and it is designed that way - the problem is that it's long enough for people to abandon calls as they think there is a problem. The queue is in conference mode, but this isn't an issue with users answering calls from queues so I don't think that is relevant anyway. Is it true that this delay is expected behavior? Is it expected due to a technical limitation or is it really designed that way?
Using an external number as an agent in call queue
My client has an auto attendant which sends calls to a queue that rings his desk phone. However, the queue also needs to activate an external ringer in case he's out in the field. I currently have such a ringer on a VoIP ATA (It is a Grandstream HT801) that is connected via SIP to another provider. To get it to ring, I just need to dial its number. I have set up a Teams user called External Ring with immediate call forwarding enabled to the ringer phone number and joined it to the queue. This user has Office 365 Business Basic and Business Voice licenses. Direct dials to the External Ring user work, but calls from the queue will not ring the forwarded number. Configuring the ringer number for simultaneous ring on my client's user account won't work for the same reason. From the posts I have seen so far, Teams queues will not ring external numbers defined on user accounts. I've toyed around with using SIP gateway, but it appears to only support a small pool of devices, and I'm not sure I could get the ATA to work with it. Is there some kind of workaround that anyone knows of?