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. Launch Demo 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.Use multiple phone numbers in a unified experience with Teams Phone user multi-line
We’re excited to announce general availability of Microsoft Teams Phone user multi-line, which lets admins assign up to 10 phone numbers to a single Teams Phone user. What is Teams Phone user multi-line? Many organizations need a simple way for a single person to represent multiple lines of business or regions across calling without juggling multiple Teams accounts, devices, or complicated call routing workarounds. Teams Phone user multi-line helps streamline that experience by enabling a Teams user to make and receive calls for multiple phone numbers within one unified Teams experience. Here’s what the experience delivers: Assign up to 10 phone numbers to one user: Administrators can configure multiple numbers for a single user, such as when one person needs to handle calls for different departments or roles. Supports localized calling across markets: Serve customers with a familiar local caller ID by using region-specific numbers, helping build greater trust into each interaction. One experience across endpoints: Supported across Teams desktop and Teams Phone devices, so users can make and receive calls from multiple numbers without the hassle of switching accounts or hardware. The result: less overhead for admins and a cleaner calling experience for users who need to handle more than one business calling number in Teams. Teams Phone user multi-line in action Here are a few example use cases for how user multi-line can help workers be more effective: Represent multiple departments or brands. A communications director supports both press relations (PR) and analyst relations (AR). With user multi-line, they can take inbound calls for either function and place outbound calls using the appropriate number. Support different regional identities. A customer success manager covers North America and Europe. They can use dedicated regional numbers so customers reach the right line and see a familiar local caller ID. Operate multiple roles without switching contexts. A Facilities Manager supports both day-to-day operations and after-hours incident response. With two dedicated numbers assigned, they can keep communications organized while managing calls from one Teams client. Get started today Teams administrators can set up the experience. Start using Teams Phone user multi-line today, learn more.
Expanding Teams Best Practice Configurations: 3 Scenarios to Elevate Call Quality and Reliability
We’re excited to announce the next phase of enhancements to the Best practice configurations dashboard in Teams admin center with three new scenarios that further empower administrators to optimize their tenant’s collaboration experienceEnable core Microsoft Teams calling functionality on compatible legacy SIP phones with SIP Gateway
While Microsoft Teams phone devices provide the richest and most complete Teams experience, we understand that there are many customers with existing investments in legacy devices. To help customers leverage their existing telephony hardware as they move to Teams Phone, we are excited to announce that SIP Gateway, a solution that enables core Teams calling functionality on compatible SIP phone models from Cisco, Poly, Yealink and AudioCodes is now generally available.New Meeting and Calling Experience in Microsoft Teams!
You may have seen the recent announcement of new meeting features in Teams in Reimagining virtual collaboration for the future of work and learning (if not, check it out!). Today, we’re pleased to share that we’re making several of these features available to most user s of Teams over the next few days.Introducing Operator Connect and more Teams Calling updates
We are committed to building a modern calling solution that is simple and quick to deploy – for example with innovations like Operator Connect, which we are excited to introduce today. The updates shared here represent just some of our on-going efforts, and you can watch the Microsoft Teams Calling session at Ignite to hear more.Learn how Microsoft enabled company-wide emergency calling in the U.S. with Microsoft Teams Phone
Intuitive and reliable emergency calling is fundamental to the health and safety of any organization. For Microsoft, meeting e911 calling requirements for 172 buildings spread across the United States posed technical and geographic challenges. But thoughtful planning and inclusive participation was critical to enabling this functionality, on time and under budget.
