Your phone system.
Inside Teams.

Most organisations already use Teams for chat, meetings and file sharing. Teams Phone extends that to ordinary telephone calls, so the app people have open all day also becomes the way they call customers and take calls from the outside world.

The appeal is consolidation. There is one directory, one presence indicator, one set of devices to manage and one application to learn. For IT it removes a separate system to maintain; for staff it removes the habit of switching between a handset and a screen to do related things.

Out of the box, Teams calls other Teams users. Calling ordinary telephone numbers requires connecting Teams to the public telephone network, which is the part we take care of.

Once connected, users dial from the Teams dial pad on desktop or mobile, calls to your business numbers arrive in Teams, and transfers, holds and forwarding behave as people expect from a phone system. Headsets and Teams-certified devices can be added where users prefer physical hardware, and reception areas or shared spaces can still have a handset.

Your main switchboard number, department numbers and individual direct dials can be brought across to Teams, so customers carry on calling exactly as they do today and none of your printed or online material needs changing.

We plan this as a scheduled piece of work: users are licensed and configured, the call flow is agreed and tested, and the numbers are moved at an agreed time. We check upfront that the numbers involved can be transferred, and if there is any exception you hear about it before the project starts rather than during it.

Teams supports the call handling a business actually needs, provided somebody configures it properly. Auto-attendant menus greet callers and direct them to the right department, call queues distribute calls across a group with hold announcements, and time-of-day and holiday routing handle out-of-hours callers sensibly.

We map these against how your organisation works before touching the configuration: which team answers first, what happens on overflow, how a caller reaches a person rather than voicemail, and where calls should go when the office is closed. Left to defaults, this is the area that most commonly disappoints people after a Teams calling rollout.

Teams does not have to be an all-or-nothing decision. Many organisations run a mixed estate — Teams for office and hybrid staff, handsets from a hosted phone system in reception, a warehouse or a workshop, and mobile users on the same call flow.

We design across the whole picture rather than one product, so calls route between them properly and reporting reflects the business as a whole. Where a specialist device or an existing system needs to stay in place, we work around it instead of insisting it is replaced.

The technical side is only part of a successful move. If people do not know how to transfer a call or set up their voicemail, the rollout feels worse than the system it replaced, however well it is built.

We plan migrations in stages where that helps, test with a pilot group first, and give clear guidance to users on the handful of things they do every day. Managers get a walkthrough of anything they need to administer, and we stay close after go-live when the practical questions actually arrive.

Teams calling is not a set-and-forget deployment. New starters need numbers, call flows change as teams reorganise, and Microsoft updates the platform regularly.

We handle the day-to-day administration and stay available when something needs looking at, working alongside your internal IT or acting as your managed IT support where you would rather one team covered both. If you are weighing up calling in Teams, tell us how your teams work today and we will explain what the move would involve.