Friday 14 February 2020

Reduce telephony costs by 80% with Microsoft Teams

Recently we took on an adventure with an enthusiastic customer to improve their telephony from and old expensive legacy hardware to a new modern and future-proof solution. First things first I want to quickly describe the current scenario.

60 employees using an old NEC SIP unit solution hooked onto PSTN. I haven't even bothered to investigate it further. (installed around 2007)



Out of the 60 employees 15 are call-centre answering on average 600 sales calls.
Users use old deskphones and a call centre agent software which requires .NET framework 2.0 and Windows 7 (another reason customer wanted to move away with support for Windows 7 now gone)

The solution: 

Microsoft Teams using an SBC from a BT re-seller. We found that calling rates are on average 60-70% cheaper than the existing PSTN. So it was a no brainer to start testing it. We got everyone Plantronics Skype/Teams qualified headsets and as simple as deploying the Teams client.

For the call centre solution we have picked "MIDA". An extreamly cheap solution with features you would only expect from a 50K+ solution. Contact a MIDA partner and you will be amazed how cheap the solution is. (https://www.midasolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/MidaSolutions_LiteCallCenter_Datasheet_EN.pdf)

Initial testing is positive and call quality is better in fact then PSTN. We haven't got to the stage of setting up DSCP marking and traffic prioritisation on voice but even so the quality is amazing.

Solution took two days to deploy! If you ping me in private I will tell you who to contact and pricing.


Will keep you all posted next week how the testing goes and will publish the QoE stats.



Have a great one!
Daniel