Let’s take a look at some of the key settings which you can find by clicking the three dots in the top right hand corner of the Teams App, under Calls.
Call Handling and Forwarding
The first options relate to your inbound calling settings.
By default call forwarding is off.
You can set inbound calls to also call someone else, either another Teams Phone enabled account in your organisation, or another phone number.
Under ‘When you can’t answer a call, you can choose to redirect it to voicemail, and set the wait time before you redirect. You can also choose to ‘do nothing’ or to choose another Teams Phone enabled account, or another number.
Caller ID
You can choose to disable Caller ID to hide your phone number and profile information.
Choose a Ringtone
You can choose from a variety of built in tones for different types of inbound calls.
Manage Voicemail
Here you have a few options for your voicemail. A great feature, when someone leaves you a voicemail it get’s emailed to you as a voice recording along with a written transcript (though the accuracy of the transcript can sometimes be slightly off, with sometimes humorous results).
You can record a custom greeting, or, at the bottom, use text to speech to have the automated voice attendant speak your message. (NOTE: It’s worth testing this out once you have written it – the attendant might have trouble pronouncing some names or words, so do call yourself to test it out and change the message to a more phonetic spelling or edit the wording as appropriate).
There are a few other options you can choose when calls go to voicemail as well:
- Let the caller record a message
- Let the caller choose whether to leave a message or be transferred to someone else. If you choose the latter, you can choose who that someone should be.
- Play your greeting and end the call
- Play the greeting and then transfer to someone else, and again, you choose who that someone should be.
Manage Out Of Office Voicemail
This is useful and tied into your Outlook Out Of Office settings. You can choose to have a greeting on calls automatically when you set Out Of Office auto replies in Outlook.
Call Groups and Delegates
Lastly, you can manage your own groups and settings, allowing you to choose groups of people to receive calls on your behalf, or even delegate other users to make calls on your behalf from your own number, much like you can delegate control over your calendar.
Teams Phone System
Teams is a great hosted solution for your phones, and certainly well worth looking into if you are reviewing your phone provider. The license costs are reasonable, you can choose to have domestic calling or international calling plans, and there are no call charges. It also gives users a very intuitive and rich experience to manage their own basic settings using the same app they use every day. Central administration is also reasonably straight forward for your IT Department or Service provider.
This is just a brief overview of the end user settings. There’s a whole other set of features available in the admin portal where you can configure policies, call queues, auto attendants, and more. For a slightly more detailed overview of those settings, check out this Microsoft Learn article.
For more How To Guides on Microsoft 365 Apps, check them out here.
