Microsoft Teams Queues App with Scott Plette, Partner Group Product Manager - Calling and Premium

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Who should listen: Microsoft 365 service owners, Teams Phone administrators and UC consultants evaluating whether the Queues app can replace or reduce contact centre licensing for departmental and informal call-handling teams.

Guest: Scott Plette — Partner Group Product Manager, Calling and Premium, Microsoft

Scott Plette, a 27-year Microsoft veteran who owns all Teams calling experiences and part of Teams Premium, explains why the Queues app was built, how supervisors are adopting it ahead of agents, and what is coming next across barge/whisper/monitor, Shifts integration, mobile and shared call history. He also sets out where AI-driven call recaps and queue trend analysis fit into the roadmap.

Many thanks to Ribbon, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

• Queues app was created to serve UCaaS users who only need simple call routing, rather than paying $75–$100 per user per month for a CCaaS seat just to route calls to them. ▶ 7:42
• Dynamics 365 remains Microsoft's CCaaS answer; Queues is not intended to replace it, and the teams are working on connectivity between the two experiences, with more detail promised at Enterprise Connect. ▶ 9:16
• Voice-enabled channels failed because people did not want to navigate channel infrastructure to manage queues, especially those sitting in five to seven queues at once — hence a dedicated app. ▶ 10:16
• Delegated administration started as a partner request (changing holiday greetings) and has now been extended so almost every queue setting — adding/removing agents, music on hold — can be managed from the Teams client without granting Teams Phone admin rights. ▶ 11:17
• Adoption so far is overwhelmingly supervisor-led (live stats such as abandonment rate and wait times, historical reporting, queue management); agent adoption is deliberately expected to lag until agent-focused features land over the coming year. ▶ 12:50
• Barge, whisper and monitor was the single most requested feature and was due around April 2025, roughly six months after Queues app shipped in October/November 2024 — it is the first point where Queues app call handling diverges from native call queue media behaviour. ▶ 13:52
• Microsoft Shifts integration will auto opt agents in and out of queues at shift start and end — driven by hospital scenarios where clinicians on five or six queues forget to toggle availability — plus the ability for colleagues to opt each other out. ▶ 14:56
• Shared call history, expected in the second half of 2025, will expose all calls on a queue rather than just your own, and is the foundation for policy-based recording/transcription, automated recaps, caller context on answer and trend analysis such as staffing gaps on a given day and time. ▶ 16:30

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

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