Microsoft Teams Phone and Recording - API Integrations, Automations - Ben Richardson at SmartSearch

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, telephony and infrastructure engineers evaluating Teams compliance recording, and anyone weighing native Teams call queues against a contact centre platform or planning API-driven integration between recording, sales enablement and CRM systems.

Guest: Ben Richardson — Infrastructure Engineer, SmartSearch

Ben Richardson, Infrastructure Engineer at anti-money laundering and identity verification platform SmartSearch, joins Andy Whiteside, VP of Sales at Numonix, to explain how a 200-person business replaced an end-of-life on-premises call recorder with cloud recording for Microsoft Teams. The conversation covers requirements gathering across departments, bring-your-own Azure storage, and a self-built API integration that pushes recordings into a sales scoring platform and on into HubSpot.

Many thanks to Numonix, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• SmartSearch runs entirely on Teams Phone with direct routing via two self-managed SBCs in Azure, using native call queues, IVRs and longest-idle-agent routing plus Power BI reporting rather than a contact centre product — Richardson reckons in-the-box Teams covers 99% of their needs at their size. ▶ 6:40
• Compliance was only half the driver: the legacy recorder was near end of support and unusable for QA analysts, and the new platform had to be a Microsoft-certified recording partner and integrate with a third-party sales scoring tool. Requirements should be gathered from department heads, not decided by IT alone — the previous tool met only about 50% of departmental needs. ▶ 8:13
• Initial configuration of Numonix IX Cloud took roughly 20 minutes and five PowerShell commands against an hour-long booked slot, versus days of on-site tin, ISDN30 taps and CapEx in the legacy world. ▶ 13:26
• SmartSearch built the integration itself from Numonix's OpenAPI documentation, filtering out calls under about 90 seconds and applying age criteria; after two or three iterations, recordings now land in the Attention platform within two minutes of the agent hanging up, where AI agents score against manager-set criteria and auto-update HubSpot. ▶ 14:59
• Bring-your-own Azure storage was decisive for the InfoSec committee — SmartSearch keeps recordings in its own UK-region storage account, encrypted in transit and at rest. Numonix otherwise provisions a terabyte of redundant storage per tenant and can mirror the customer's Azure region. ▶ 22:09
• Whiteside distinguishes two consumption models: IX Cloud as the full end-to-end platform with open API, and TRAS (Teams recording as a service), a bot-only capture that drops the call plus metadata into a folder for partners such as Gong to process — typically without compliant storage attached. ▶ 17:02
• API interest has risen sharply as customers use AI coding tools to build their own integrations; Numonix has added webhooks and private endpoint support in response, and often does not know what customers have built on top. ▶ 20:05
• Microsoft certification is a starting shortlist, not a differentiator — check the vendor has real depth with Microsoft (Numonix cites being first to market on conference modes, a change that can be service-affecting), plus SOC 2 and ISO 27001, credit checks and evidence of a real customer base rather than a slick website. ▶ 26:44

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

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