Teams Insider

Teams Contact Center Options, Chris Goodwill's Perspective

Chris Goodwill is a strategic partner manager and solution specialist at Symity with around 15 years in the Microsoft UC space, focused on voice and contact centre. He walks through the three Teams contact centre certification models, where Microsoft's own Dynamics and Digital Contact Center Platfor

Prefer audio?

Who should listen: M365 service owners and UC architects evaluating contact centre options alongside Teams Phone, and partners or systems integrators positioning certified CCaaS versus Microsoft's own Dynamics and DCCP stack.

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

Many thanks to Ribbon, sponsor of this episode.

Key insights

Microsoft's three certification models are not equivalent: Connect uses certified SBCs and direct routing into Teams Phone; Extend integrates with the Teams client via Graph API for richer call control; Power uses an SDK for purely Azure-based voice applications. There are 22 certified vendors, but customers should ask which model they are actually buying. ▶ 1:35
Connect-model deployments still throw up practical problems — double pop (answering the call in both the contact centre client and the Teams client) and tromboning, with two call legs going out from one SBC and back in via the vendor's SBC. ▶ 2:36
Extend vendors are a double-edged bet: they can only build what Microsoft's API coverage allows and are waiting on API development, but they automatically inherit every new Teams capability. With Teams shipping continuously rather than on quarterly updates, keeping pace is a real burden for vendors. ▶ 4:06
Vendor commitment is a selection criterion in itself — some vendors are all-in on Extend, others hedge by keeping both Connect and Extend, and others support a dozen platforms. Ask whether the vendor's business lives or dies by Microsoft. ▶ 5:07
Power has been in the documentation for around two and a half years and no vendor formally ticks the box: the SDK is still in development and Microsoft has not articulated how partners get certified, even though some vendors already build on Azure Communication Services — the same media infrastructure that underpins Teams. ▶ 5:37
A concrete AI payback example: in social care and legal work, agents currently spend 45 minutes to an hour and a half writing call notes into the CRM. With the call recorded in Azure, transcribed, translated if needed and injected into Dynamics 365, that write-up time disappears. ▶ 8:11
Rather than launching a new contact centre SKU, Microsoft added voice and then omnichannel to Dynamics 365 Customer Service, tapping its existing Dynamics base. That makes it a poor fit for Salesforce or other CRM estates — it is too tightly coupled to justify replacing an established CRM. ▶ 18:32
The Digital Contact Center Platform is a framework architecture, not a per-seat SKU: Dynamics Customer Service for voice and omnichannel, Azure Communication Services and Cognitive Services, Nuance for biometrics, Power Virtual Agents for automation, and Entra ID. Some components are per user, some consumption-based, so it is a large-enterprise consultancy play with little inbound demand today — partners have to take the message to customers. ▶ 19:33
A partner skills gap is holding DCCP back: Dynamics partners have already paired with Genesys or NICE for contact centre, and traditional voice partners have a contact centre product but don't know Dynamics. Very few partners bridge both worlds. ▶ 29:48
Avoid pure lift and shift. Move an end-of-life on-premises platform to voice and email to get working, but plan phase two from the outset — and start with low-hanging fruit like chatbots for waste collection or pothole reporting, which are simple to build today. ▶ 25:09