Business Benefits of Teams Shared Calling

Everything old is new again, isn’t it? 

Shared calling isn’t a new thing. It’s been around since the invention of the PSTN. Remember having a family landline? You shared it with your household. 

In work, you had a phone on your desk, and you had an extension number. That extension number was internal, but when you made a call externally, it used your company’s business number and phone lines. You shared it with your colleagues. 

So, if it is normal, why are we still talking about it now in 2024? 

When the UCaaS boom happened, Microsoft moved to a per user subscription that covered their end-to-end calling. 

This license includes their client license (Teams) their feature license (Teams Phone), their direct dial number, and their calling minutes (Calling Plan). 

Whereas with the traditional PBX licensing method you paid a station license and bought your PBX to carrier connections at a ratio of the number of stations licensed (10 stations : 1 voice channel for example). Then you shared a company bundled minute plan. 

Alas, shared calling. 

In simple terms, the traditional license fee for providing a telephone connection to a user was cheap. 

A station license was just a couple of dollars a year, or in some cases a perpetual license which lasted a lifetime. 

Companies were able to extend the station to channel ratio even further to 20, 30:1, meaning that their costs come down even more per head. 

By contrast, Teams Phone is expensive. 

Every phone enabled user must have a Teams Phone license at £6.60 per month, and then if they wanted to use Microsoft as their carrier, each user must have their own minute-based calling plan from £4.50 to £18 per month depending on the plan.

Suddenly, calling transitioned from a business commodity service into a premium, needs tested service. 

As a result, the adoption of Teams Phone, especially in the pure play Microsoft model stalled.

Microsoft Shared Calling

Microsoft is on a mission to activate Teams Phone on the millions of E5 licensed users around the world who are paying for it, but not using it. 

Why aren’t they using it? There are 2 reasons: 

• Modern day communication has moved on. People now use other ways of communicating. Chat, asynchronous messaging, web meetings etc. So, they just don’t need it enough.
• Cost. Businesses have been convinced in the UC era to right size their usage of systems to get the most value out of them rather than wholesale deployments.

But the truth is that people do occasionally need the ability to make a phone call, and this is still worth business investment. 

Just not at anything that incurs a monthly commitment. 

So, Microsoft launched shared calling. The ability for users to share a calling plan minute bundle or use PAYG consumption-based calling. 

Now, you can buy as little as 120-minute calling plan for around £4.50 per month and allow all your E5 licensed users to share it. 

But you still have the question of “How many minutes do I need for this?”. 

As calling plans are an annual commitment, whatever you decide is your budget, you are stuck with for 12 months.

No problem if you’ve under committed, but if you’ve over committed, you have to wait 12 months to right size back down. 

That could be a lot of wasted minutes and money. 

The other option is to use PAYG. This gives you the flexibility of controlling some of the cost without having to commit to a monthly plan. 

However, there are a couple of things to consider that depending on how your business operates could be make PAYG inaccessible to you. 

1. Microsoft PAYG rates are not competitive and carry a premium of around 50% more than the market competition.
2. Communication credits require a credit card
3. All PAYG minutes must be pre-paid, meaning that you have to spend a budget with Microsoft before you’ve made any calls.
4. Handling top-ups through complex business finance processes can be operationally prohibitive.

Highlighting The Need For Shared Calling 

We’ve spent years talking about right sizing and phones have been taken away from users because some bright spark in IT ran a report of the last month’s phone usage and determined you didn’t make the qualifying cut to keep it. 

Or, IT didn’t have the data so just profiled you and decided for you. 

Oh well, if you were bothered enough you could appeal by completing a form and providing 101 reasons why you need a phone for it to be reviewed by 20 lines of management. 

Only for it to be declined due to lack of budget. 

So, what do you do when you need to make a business call? That’s right, you unlock your personal iPhone and make it. 

The problems with this are: 

• Users think that this method is acceptable and what they must do to do their job. Therefore, will never raise it with IT again.
• IT are never aware that the user has a technology service need and that they are failing to provide the necessary tools for people to work effectively.
• User’s workflow is broken as they must step away from their UC tool to make a phone call, holding a device to their ear, whilst trying to find supporting information using a mouse or trackpad.
• Users are paying for business calls using their personal money.
• Personal numbers pose a business and data risk. Your suppliers / customers have direct personal access to your users.
• IT don’t know about the calls as they are unaudited and breaching compliance.
• If your user leaves and they work in a customer relationship role, they leave with your business customers in their personal address book.
• You are potentially failing in your employee welfare responsibilities by not providing levels of protection to your workers by giving them the ability to ‘turn off work’ outside of working hours. Having personal numbers gives customers unlimited access to your workers, and they may feel they must answer it (which is working).

Benefits Of Enabling Shared Calling

By enabling shared calling in Teams, you can mitigate all these issues. 

Users are enabled with the Teams Phone dial pad in their app so they can work hands free productively. 

When they need to make a phone call, they can instinctively use their desktop and not use their personal device which means that: 

• They aren’t paying personally for business calls.
• They feel better supported by you by giving them frictionless access to communications tools.
• They can switch off from work at the end of the day knowing they cannot be interrupted and retain control over their choice to work or not outside of hours.
• Their personal number is not exposed to business customers or suppliers which could potentially be a GDPR concern.

For you as a business you benefit from:

• Increased compliance and conformance being able to account for every business phone call.
• Maintain your business identity to your customers when shared calling users call from your business number rather than their personal number.
• Take control of call back scenarios where your customers are trying to contact you, but the employee they are used to calling personally is on vacation. Now you can answer them via your contact center or switchboard.
• Protect your company customer relationships so when employees leave, they can’t easily take your customers with them without you knowing about it.
• Fuller understanding of your calling needs within your business that give you an opportunity to optimize calling provisions based on complete data.

Enabling shared calling can also help meet your obligations to worker’s welfare whilst working in your offices. 

If a worker finds themselves in need of emergency treatment and the only device within arm’s reach is their workstation, then the ability to dial 911 / 999 could be a matter of life and death. 

Ask yourself, could you confidently defend your company in court against a negligence case where the victim had the required tools to make an emergency call, but the business had chosen not to enable it to save a few dollars? 

Maintaining Cost Control 

I can understand the hesitancy towards enabling shared calling for everyone. You don’t want to be writing a blank check to your carrier every month. 

You don’t want employees abusing the privilege by making long distance personal calls. 

How can you control it with Microsoft? 

With calling plans from Microsoft, the answer is complex. As there is no difference in calling plan licenses between full blown Teams Phone users and shared calling you have 2 user demographics. 

1. Users who need a guaranteed number of minutes per month for regular calling
2. Users who need occasional use of Teams calling

What happens if the occasional users abuse their allocated shared calling plan attached to the resource account? 

They will use unspent minutes from other calling plans that your regular users rely on. 

The issue then is that potentially through indiscipline or miscalculation, your occasional users impact the business function. 

However, there is 1 technicality that could help you mitigate this. 

Microsoft calling plans are pooled minutes, even though they need to be assigned per user. 

However, they pool within the same license SKU only. 

This means that if you have bought a 1,200-minute domestic calling plan for your regular users, you can buy a 3,000-minute or 120-minute calling plan for your shared calling resource account and when those minutes are used, their service stops, whilst your regular users continue.

The alternative option you have for cost control is to enable PAYG calling using communication credits and assign this to the shared calling resource account. 

Now all you need to do is load the communication credits account with a sum of money and you’re billed per-minute. 

As mentioned before, this method can be quite expensive and difficult for your business to transact. 

Top line costs aside, you can apply configuration to your Teams users to control what destinations they can call. 

This with Microsoft calling plans / PAYG is limited to domestic (the country’s usage location which they’re licensed for Teams), or international. 

With calling plans there are additional charges that are out of plan that will require an element of PAYG if they’re needed. 

The positive is that with Teams Admin Center you can monitor the cost and usage of your calls and fine tune your limits over time. 

What Other Options Are There For Shared Calling? 

The obvious question is can I use Operator Connect? Right now, not many Operators on this program offer shared calling. Those that do come with some caveats. 

Your other option is to use Callroute. 

I have specifically tailored our shared calling solution to offer you the cheapest, least hassle, and most efficient method of enabling shared calling. 

Here is what you get: 

• 1 x UK 0330 number you can adopt as one of your business numbers.
• Simple PAYG calling with UK domestic calls charged at 1p per minute and 5p to mobile making us 50% cheaper than Microsoft’s PAYG rates.
• No additional license subscription needed other than Teams Phone.
• No per user per month fee from us.
• No credit card or pre-payment of calling credit. Just normal invoicing.
• No minimum usages.
• Set your monthly calling budget cap so that costs don’t escalate
• We will even configure your tenant for shared calling.

Our shared calling works alongside your existing Teams Phone solution. You don’t need to change your provider. 

Find out more here: Shared Calling For Teams - Callroute 

If you’re using E5 but not enabled Teams Phone, there is really no excuse not to. The benefits of enabling it for your workforce far outweigh the cost worries associated. 

Let’s have a chat if you’re interested in enabling shared calling for your organization.