Microsoft Teams: Phone Systems & Direct Routing

To Direct Route or not to Direct Route? Regardless of size, this is a question that many organisations are asking.

Direct routing has grown in popularity over the last year, as many organisations found themselves deploying a solution to support the business and employees to work from home. 

With Teams also offering calling plans, organisations must do their research to find a solution that best suits their needs and weigh up the benefits of direct routing as a long-term solution. 

UC Today sat down with industry experts, including Mike Korkidakis from Wavenet, to discuss the pros and cons of direct routing as well as what type of organisation may benefit from Microsoft calling plans.

Why is Direct Routing so popular vs Microsoft’s own calling plans?

Direct routing is so popular because it opens up a broader feature set, more diverse integrations, enhanced margins, industry competitive call costs and further international capabilities. Typical direct routing providers have expertise in the voice field, have built robust platforms and paired that with more advanced feature sets. It does all this while utilising the benefits of the single Teams interface and the bonus of the native Teams feature set, which of course, is constantly being developed by Microsoft. It also opens a more tailored support infrastructure as typically direct routing providers have dedicated voice support and expertise, allowing that element to be supported by specialists whilst having the benefits of the truly collaborative teams experience.

Is Direct Routing for large and complex companies only or are small businesses and start-ups adopting it too?

There are truly no restrictions here, companies that are small to larger-scale enterprises are adopting direct routing globally. From a cost perspective, direct routing is in line with the native Microsoft calling but offers that broader set of features. More importantly, it allows the ability for a more tailored experience. Direct routing and the open application programming interfaces that Microsoft have allows providers to customise features. This of course then means the customisation can be tailored to specific industries or simply to an individual organisation and their unique requirements. This can be anything from delivering bespoke reports over an API that produces relevant information to that business, to fully compliant call recording paired with CRM integrations for regulated organisations in the financial sector. Direct routing offers an extended approach to collaboration and the ability to deliver a bespoke and unique solution customer by customer regardless of size.

Who does a business contact to deploy direct routing? What’s the buying process?

Especially for those organisations that have already adopted M365 the option to enhance the Teams experience by adding in external calling is easy and made simple by direct routing providers. With no changes to the M365 environment, no changes to a tenancy and end-users maintaining their sign-in criteria the rollout is made easier. Organisations like ourselves have focused on automation allowing the direct routing set up to be fully managed, simple, and supported throughout the entire deployment, from initial scoping calls to proof of concept and end-user training.