How can operators benefit from offering Teams integration with Gintel’s Cloud PBX?
Integrating Gintel’s Cloud PBX with Microsoft Teams gives your B2B customers a better experience – not just breakout calls to fixed and mobile numbers but also true status federation across both platforms. How does this help your business – and drive efficiency for your B2B users?
Widespread adoption means that Teams is ubiquitous
Most of us use Microsoft Teams. According to Statista[1], adoption has reached 320 million users worldwide – with massive growth in recent years.
All of which means, your B2B customers are more likely to be using Teams than almost any other platform. So, you need to capitalise on this widespread adoption – while also adding another sticky service to your portfolio. How can you achieve this?
Well, with Gintel’s Cloud PBX, you can also enable integration with Microsoft Teams – and deliver a new set of value to your clients. But how do your customers benefit from this?
What benefits can you offer by integrating your Gintel Cloud PBX with Microsoft Teams?
The answer is simple. Gintel’s Teams integration option provides a seamless experience across different communications channels. Key to this is the effective federation and management of user status.
If you are on a Teams call, the status to your colleagues and contacts who are also on Teams is shown as busy. Similarly, if you have an appointment in your calendar, Teams can recognise this and also show that you are unavailable for the duration of the appointment.
But your mobile or desk phone, or soft client doesn’t know that status – so, calls can be sent from the network to your mobile, creating that classic situation of “let me just take this call” during the Teams session.
But as an operator, you can give your customers a better experience. With your Gintel Cloud PBX deployment, you can easily integrate with Teams to add both cross-platform calling and synchronisation of status. How and what is the experience delivered?
What experience do your B2B customers receive?
Gintel’s Cloud PBX can integrate with Microsoft’s APIs, so that we can extract status indications from Office applications — including Teams, of course, but also calendar and Active Directory — and also push status indicators back to these platforms. That means that, if one of your Cloud PBX subscribers is busy on their mobile, their status will be changed in Teams — and vice versa.
Similarly, if they are in a meeting and their calendar is blocked, then they will also be shown as unavailable in both Teams and in the switchboard. Depending on the policies set by the enterprise administrator in your customer organisation, they can also be removed from any queues or hunt groups to which they belong, so that their current status is always accurately reflected across all platforms.
Individual users can also set their own preferences – perhaps they would like to be reached by certain people on their mobile, even while in a meeting. Easy – just configure settings. If they are busy on a mobile call, then they will be shown as busy with respect to their Teams contacts.
In addition to status federation, you can also add call integration. This means that calls to user mobiles (on your MSISDNs) can be received on the Teams client – or users can call colleagues from Teams to mobile or fixed lines.
This gives three service enhancements that you can offer:
- Teams breakout, with combinations of:
- Teams to mobile
- Mobile to Teams
- Fixed to Teams
- Teams to fixed
- Etc
- Federated status
- Accurate updating of status depending on appointments, preferences and availability, across your Gintel Cloud PBX deployment and Teams
- Combined status and Teams / mobile / fixed calling
In practice, Teams to mobile / mobile to Teams calling on their own is rarely adopted, because without status, users can suffer from the annoyance of calls that interrupt them when on one platform but not another.
So, the best approach is to offer true integration with status federation, or, as an entry-point, just federated status. You can choose to offer the former – but the choice is yours. Having decided on the approach you want to deliver, what do you need?
How do you achieve this integration in practice?
There are two ways to enable integration with Microsoft: Operator Connect and Direct Routing. Operator Connect is supported by a growing number of Tier 1 operators, while Direct Routing allows any service provider to enable a PSTN connection to Microsoft Teams users, so they can make and receive external calls to fixed or mobile numbers, on any device using Teams.
We support both integration approaches – but for Direct Routing, an SBC is required that must support the correct configuration settings. There are plenty of options for this and Gintel has solutions if you don’t already have this in place.
Second, your customers need their own Office 365 and Teams licenses and accounts, which they will either obtain directly from Microsoft, or else from a certified partner. These need to have the correct options enabled, so that Teams integration can be configured.
Next, we connect the SBC to a DNS at Microsoft, so we create and virtual pathway from the Microsoft Teams environment to your Cloud PBX platform. Finally, we will use our Microsoft Graph API integration to ensure that we can share status and control routing of calls across the platforms.
It's basically easy – and a simple upgrade to the baseline feature set. So, why do it?
Why should operators launch Teams integration?
Well, it leaves you as the operator or service provider in control of the MSISDN / phone numbers of your B2B clients. You manage all break-out / break-in traffic, while also controlling status across the devices used by your customers. In other words, you remain the focal point for the overall B2B communications service, while Microsoft handles the Teams part – with Gintel’s Cloud PBX in the middle.
And, you can decide on the business model. You may choose to charge your customers for this integration, or you may not – but what you definitely get is stickiness for your own service portfolio, as Teams is subordinate to this, rather than the other way around.
Your customers can make and receive calls to and from Teams to mobile or fixed numbers, while their status is securely federated across the key access points that matter to their organisation – the main numbers, direct numbers for mobile and fixed, and so on. They can control how users are moved in and out of queues, users can select the most appropriate devices for conversations – and how they manage their availability.
It's a win-win – and an opportunity to deliver an enhanced experience for your customers, even as they embrace other platforms – but with you in charge.
Talk to Gintel
If you’d like to know more, please get in touch. Gintel helps operators succeed in highly competitive markets, achieving differentiation for their business service portfolio.
Our telecommunications heritage, know-how and experience are backed by a track record of delivering successful solutions to Tier 1 operators, MVNOs, ISPs and Systems Integrators.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033742/worldwide-microsoft-teams-daily-and-monthly-users/
