Future of Voice Applications.
Future of Voice Applications Policies
Voice Applications Policies are a way for administrators to delegate Auto Attendant and Call Queue changes to specific authorized users in their organisation.
Currently, you are able to allow these authorized users to change the following settings:
- Auto Attendants
- Business Hour greeting
- After Hour greeting
- Holiday greeting
- Call Queues
- Welcome Greeting
- Music on Hold
- Shared Voicemail greeting for call overflow
- Shared Voicemail greeting for call timeout
- Shared Voicemail greeting for no agents
All of these setting are editable directly in the Microsoft Teams client without the need to delegate access to the Teams Admin Center. Below you can see an example of what an authorized users can see for a specific Call Queue they are managing.
The functionality for Voice Applications Policies looks to be expanding rapidly. On the Microsoft Learn page we can see that there is a now a larger number of features that are able to be set via PowerShell however these are currently sat behind a limited public preview. I believe these are the feature sets that are being made available via the newly announced Queues App from Microsoft.
Let’s take a look at those new feature flags:
| Teams Setting Name | AA / CQ | Teams Premium required |
|---|---|---|
| Business Hours | AA | YES |
| Business Hours call routing | AA | YES |
| After hours call routing | AA | YES |
| Holiday hours dates and hours | AA | YES |
| Holiday hours call routing | AA | YES |
| Real-time Auto Attendant metrics | AA | YES |
| Historical Auto Attendant metrics using Queues App | AA | YES |
| Membership | CQ | YES |
| Conference mode | CQ | YES |
| Agent Routing Method | CQ | YES |
| Presence-based routing | CQ | YES |
| Opt out (queue configuration) | CQ | YES |
| Routing for call overflow | CQ | YES |
| Routing for call timeout | CQ | YES |
| Routing for no agents | CQ | YES |
| Opt agent in/out of queue | CQ | YES |
| Real-time Call Queue metrics | CQ | YES |
| Real-time agent metrics | CQ | YES |
| Historical Call Queue metrics using Queues App | CQ | YES |
| Historical agent metrics using Queues app | CQ | YES |
There are both Auto Attendant and Call Queue features coming and as mentioned all the new features have a requirement for the Microsoft Teams Premium addon license. Some functionality that I will personally be looking forward to are as follows:
- Membership – change who is/isn’t in the Call Queue
- Agent Routing Method – change which routing method is used in the Call Queue (Attendant, Serial, Round Robin, Longest Idle)
- Real-time Call Queue & Agent Metrics – ability to access real-time metrics for Call Queues and Agents
Some of these features will be able to bridge the gap between what is available natively in Microsoft Teams and when to go for a 3rd Party service, however I still believe there is a lot of functionality missing and we’ll dive into that in another post.
I expect to see some of these features released and usable with the General Availability of the Queues App now slated for rollout August 2024 and hope to see this feature set grow in the future to allow even less reliance on IT Administrators and access to the Teams Admin Center for simple configuration changes.