Enhancement to Microsoft Teams Call Queue and Auto Attendant to change the greetings and announcements by authorized users

If you use Microsoft Teams for your business communication, you may want to customize the greetings and announcements your callers hear when they dial your phone number. For example, you may want to update the welcome message, the menu options, the hold music, or the out-of-office message. Every time a change needs to be made, the user has to open a ticket with the Helpdesk team to update. It's a manual & time-consuming process, and you need to have the appropriate permissions in Microsoft Teams. You need to be either a global administrator, a Teams service administrator, or a Teams Communications administrator.

To overcome this challenge and reduce the IT Helpdesk calls, Microsoft released a new feature in TAC to configure the Call Queue and Auto Attendant to assign the authorized user to change the greetings and announcements in Microsoft Teams Call Queue and Auto Attendant by authorized users.

Call Queue and Auto Attendant are two features of Microsoft Teams that allow you to manage incoming calls more efficiently. 

• Call Queue lets you create a queue of callers who are waiting to speak to someone from your team. You can assign agents to answer calls from the queue, and set up greetings, music, and overflow options for the callers.
• Auto Attendant lets you create a phone menu system that directs callers to different destinations based on their choices. You can set up greetings, menu options, dial-by-name directories, and transfer rules for the callers.

How to set up the Authorized user on the AA/CQ?

• Sign in to the Microsoft Teams admin center with your credentials.

• In the left navigation pane, click on Voice > Call queues or Voice > Auto attendants, depending on which feature you want to modify.

• Select the call queue or auto attendant that you want to edit, and click on Edit.

• In the Edit call queue or Edit auto attendant page,

• Select Authorize users section and click Add and type the user who is authorized to update the greetings.

Voice Application Policies -

The Teams voice application policies are a way to control the features and settings of voice applications in Microsoft Teams. Voice applications such as AA & CQ.

• Sign in to the Microsoft Teams admin center with your credentials.

• In the left navigation pane, click on Voice >Voice applications policies.

• Create/Modify the policy and enable AA/CQ settings based on scenarios.

• Assign the policy to required users.

Once the inband provisioning is pushed/synced. On the Teams client, Select the Setting and Calls tab.

Select the Call Queue or Auto Attendant that you want to modify the greetings,

For Auto Attendant -

Based on your Voice application policy settings, you can modify the Business hour greeting, After hours greeting, or holiday greeting.

For Call Queue -

In Call Queue, you can Opt-In/Out of the Call Queue, change the greeting and music on hold file etc.

Microsoft Teams Shared Voicemail Now Supports Distribution Lists and Mail Enabled Security Groups

How Shared Voicemail works in Microsoft Teams?

You need Microsoft 365 Group it can either be Outlook Group or Teams Group. Either you can create a new one or use an existing one. M365 Groups are enabled for voicemail by default. So, no need for any configuration on the Group itself. Make sure the members who need to receive these shared voicemails are members of this group.

Once you have the M365 group, you can associate the group on the Auto Attendant or Call Queue to deliver the voicemail to the Outlook group or Voice-enabled Teams channels.

What is Voice Enabled Teams Channels?

Voice-Enabled Channels enable a call queue to be connected to a channel in Microsoft Teams. Users can collaborate and share information within the channel while taking calls in the queue. All Team members will be agents in that Queue and can easily opt-in or opt-out of the call queue from the Channel they can also see other agents call statuses, access shared voicemails, and call history and make outbound/call back from Channel.

New changes to Shared Voicemail settings in Teams -

Have you configured Microsoft Teams Auto Attendant or Call Queue in your environment and used Shared Voicemail with M365 Groups, then you have some good news for you. 

I recently noticed that Teams Call Queue/Auto Attendant allows you to send the voicemail to the Email Distribution Group.

Now you can distribute the voicemail to anyone in the distribution group and have everyone access to the voicemail within Outlook client.

Microsoft Teams Auto Attendant and Call Queue Reporting - Enhanced Report V3.0.4 released

Microsoft released Teams Auto Attendant and Call Queue Reporting PowerBI - Enhanced Report V3.0.4 with Corrected errors, improved call classification, data pipeline and added new legends to the report.

You can download the last version - Download Power BI Query Template For Teams Voice Applications (Auto Attendant and Call Queue) from Official Microsoft Download Center

This PowerBI template provides 3 different reports for Auto Attendant, Call Queue and Call Queue Agents Timeline,

• The Auto Attendant report shows analytics for calls coming into your auto attendants.
• The Call Queue report shows analytics for calls coming into your call queues.
• The Agent Timeline report shows a timeline view of agents being active in call queue calls.

CQD PowerBI Connector Installation

Assume you've already installed Power BI Desktop on your computer and that your account has the necessary permissions to access the CQD data pipeline.

Once you downloaded the PowerBI template, Open Teams Auto Attendant & Call Queue Historical Reports V3.0.4.pbit template file.

You'll be prompted to select the Data Source. Select the api.interfaces.records.teams.microsoft.com entry.

You'll be prompted to sign in with an account. Select Organizational account tab and then select Sign in.

How the data pipeline works?

Earlier versions used Call Quality Dashboard access to view the historical calls report and doesn't use the Call Quality Dashboard (CQD) data pipeline. 

If you need to give access to non-IT user you need to assign one of these permissions.

With V3.0.4 Microsoft using Voice Applications Analytics Collector (VAAC) service to report Auto Attendant, Call Queue and Agent Timeline reports.

Auto Attendant :-

This report will provide statistics on incoming call type (internal vs external), Avg.Calls in AA and Avg.user action and final call results e.g Call Disconnected, No user action, No operator, Disconnected with user action, call transfered to external/call queue etc..

Now even go deeper for user action to reach internal user either using DTMF/Voice on the directory search.

Call Queue: -

This report will provide statistics on incoming call type (internal vs external), how long user was on the queue before agent was answer the call or abandoned, Final call results, Call overflow etc..

Agent Timeline: -

There is not much changed on this report compare to earlier versions.