Recently I was tasked with creating a service desk call-flow for one of my clients. The requirement was not too complex & didn't require the integration of any CCaaS solution within their Microsoft Teams environment.
The proposal of creating it on native Teams contact center (blend of auto-attendant & call-queues within) was well perceived. The environment utilized Microsoft Calling Plans for telephony.
Requirement Understanding
The client had a global presence (US, EMEA & APAC) & required the service desk agents to receive calls in a 24*7 environment.
Call Flow for after hours for one region would result the call being forwarded to another regions call flow. Example- A caller who calls in to EMEA call-flow after hours, would be serviced by an agent in the US call-flow.
This maintained a 24*7 (or at least major portion of it) availability with a some overlaps* in time. This also meant, the call-flow would be always online & there was no need to leave a voice-mail as callers are always expected to connect to an agent regardless of time or physical location of the agent.
Design
To achieve this design, 3 Auto-Attendants (AA) were planned along with 3 Call-Queues (CQ).
The AA's would serve as routing decision makers, where-as the agents would actually be defined within the regional CQs. In all deployments, as a healthy practice it is best to understand customer's requirement & draw it on Visio (pen/paper) & then try to implement the same.
You'll understand this clearly with the below diagram.
Routing (Auto-Attendants & Call Queues)
The 3 AAs
1) US (AA) - The AA for US/Canada were mapped with the 2 regional resource accounts which had the number assigned to them.
Ideally nothing stopped a caller from calling directly the US/Canada regional numbers to be connected directly with US agents. We created this with the partial plan in mind that this use-case will be used, however, those numbers were never advertised on company's websites.
2) EMEA (AA) - Same logic as above. Countries within this region were Malta, Bulgaria, UK & Ireland (4 countries). The Irish number was in fact the publicized number as the main-line entry point for the Service Desk call-flow.
3) APAC (AA) - Same logic as above. Countries within this region were India, Mauritius, Hong-Kong & Singapore. The AA however had 2 resource accounts for Hong-Kong & Singapore.
Note: All these were service numbers procured part of calling plan. Do note calling plans for outbound is limited to around 26 countries * (Check MSFT site for latest) however for inbound calls, pretty much all countries are covered for availability.
As you can see the settings for the call-flow, the call comes in to the Auto-Attendant & is immediately re-directed to the regional Call Queue (based on the business hours).
If it would be out of business hours for EMEA, the escape action would be to send the call to US-AA as can be seen below.
This logic applied to all Auto-Attendants.
The 3 CQs
Now let's take a look at the Call-Queue settings (example - EMEA).
1) Associated with a resource account - No Phone Number (not needed)
2) Greeting - None
3) Music on Hold - Play Default Music
4) Call Answering** - Users & Groups - Agents added individually.
5) Routing Method - Attendant Routing
6) Call Alert Time - 30 Seconds
7) Call Overflow Handling - Maximum Calls in the Queue - 15 (after that disconnect)
8) Call Time-Out Handling - Maximum Wait Time - 5 minutes (after that disconnect)
Minor Challenges
1) * Due to the time difference overlap between APAC & EMEA, many agents of APAC region would sit idle as EMEA shift started & the main-line number being an Irish number gave precedence to EMEA AA/CQ.
APAC call queue following Singapore Time-Zone but having agents mostly present in India created a bit of problem here. The client later decided to procure a service number for India, for better time-management of the call flow.
Workaround - Discussing this with the client it was decided to add the APAC agents to EMEA call flow & that sorted availability issues.
In doing so I also realized there is a limit (20) to agents which can be added individually to the call-queues. To add more you can create a DL or an O365 Group and the Group itself to the Call-Queue.
2) ** Agents would get calls even if they were already engaged in a call & the toast notification disturbed them.
BusyOnBusy (TeamsCallingPolicy) was implemented tackle this issue.
Assigned to the users.
I've not gone through the basics of AA/CQ setup as it is not a new concept at all & pretty much everyone in the Teams ecosystem is aware on how to deploy it. This was just my experience dealing with it recently & how it was implemented.
References
For Service Number queries I was in touch with PTNEU@microsoft.com (PSTN Service Desk).
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