Comparing Dynamics 365 Contact Center to Teams Contact Centers with Chris Goodwill

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, UC architects and partner sales teams evaluating contact centre options on Microsoft — particularly anyone weighing Dynamics 365 Contact Center against Teams-certified ecosystem vendors or the native Queues app, and those needing to model licensing and consumption costs.

Guest: Chris Goodwill — Strategic Partner Manager and Solutions Specialist, Symity

Chris Goodwill, Strategic Partner Manager and Solutions Specialist at Symity, specialises in contact centre solutions across the Microsoft estate. He traces the lineage of Dynamics 365 Contact Center from Customer Care Framework through DCCP, unpicks the licensing and consumption charges, and sets out which customers are a better fit for the Teams ecosystem vendors instead.

Many thanks to Logitech, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• Dynamics 365 Contact Center is decoupled from Dynamics 365 CRM and can run headless — customers on Salesforce or ServiceNow have connectors available, so the first conversation with any prospect is explaining that they do not need to be a Dynamics customer despite the product name. ▶ 4:35
• Dynamics CRM only holds roughly 8–10% of the CRM market, so decoupling massively widens Microsoft's addressable contact centre market and puts it in direct competition with the Teams ISV ecosystem that has grown up since Lync. ▶ 5:38
• List pricing is $110 per seat for combined digital and voice, or $95 for voice-only (or digital-only), with a separate Dynamics 365 Customer Service Premium licence bundling CRM plus contact centre functionality — at the higher end compared with ecosystem vendors. ▶ 9:13
• Budget beyond the per-seat price: entitlements are pooled at tenant level at 50 record routes per user per month (excluding chats, calls and texts), 2,000 intelligent voicebot minutes per user per month and 6,000 call intelligence minutes per month, with overage charged on top. ▶ 10:46
• Azure Communication Services charges separately for call routing whether you buy numbers from Microsoft or bring Azure direct routing — Symity had to build its own pricing calculator because total cost of ownership modelling proved surprisingly complex, and customers new to AI features often cannot predict their own consumption. ▶ 11:48
• Deployment profile differs sharply: an ecosystem contact centre such as Luware or Anywhere 365 can be stood up live on a webinar as pure SaaS, whereas Dynamics 365 Contact Center has separate voice routing (it does not use Teams) plus AI and line-of-business integration work that demands real consultancy — which is why it lands as an enterprise and large-org play. ▶ 16:24
• Segment the market three ways: Queues app in Teams for the low end, ecosystem vendors for mid-range omnichannel needs where the customer does not want to invest in configuration, and Dynamics 365 Contact Center where there is clean, well-maintained knowledge base data for Copilot to draw on. ▶ 25:07
• The ISV ecosystem is not standing still and is buying in AI — Anywhere 365 has acquired DeepDesk and Puzzel has acquired an AI business — but Dynamics' pitch is that Nuance IVR and Copilot come as one integrated solution. ▶ 19:29

Insights summarised by AI from the episode transcript, reviewed by the Empowering.Cloud team.

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