An AI Receptionist for Microsoft Teams Phone: Use Cases, Features and What to Check First

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Moving to Microsoft Teams Phone tidies up your phones. The numbers sit in one place, staff can answer on a laptop or a mobile, and the old phone system goes. But when your team is flat out, the call still rings until somebody gives up.

An AI receptionist is the obvious next step, and getting one to answer is the easy part. The harder questions are whether the caller reaches the right person, and whether the agent knows what your team knows. Microsoft 365 already holds your people, their numbers, their calendars and your files. We have built two ways to connect our agents to Teams. One runs today and the other is in final testing.

The after hours assumption

People usually buy an AI receptionist for after hours. One service business that shared a review of its current AI receptionist with us shows why that can be the wrong starting point. 96% of its calls came in during business hours. 49% of callers asked for a specific person. Transfers were switched off, so every call ended as a message.

Those callers still waited for a call back, and someone in the office still worked through the list. If half your callers want a particular person, the job to get right is putting them through. That depends on how the agent connects to Teams.

What the agent does on Teams

Catching call queue overflow. Your team is busy and the queue times out, so Teams hands the call to the AI instead of voicemail. The agent finds out what the caller needs and deals with it or transfers them. Watch the transfer target. If the agent sends the caller back to the queue that just overflowed, they end up exactly where they started. Give it a person or a different team to try, and a fallback for when nobody is available.

Putting callers through by name. "Is Sarah there?" The agent knows who Sarah is and rings her Teams number. If she doesn't answer, it takes the details and emails her a summary, so she calls back knowing what the call is about. This only works as well as your staff directory, including who covers for whom when somebody is on leave.

Answering from your own documents. Your agent can answer from the SharePoint and OneDrive folders you choose. When someone updates a price list, it picks up the new one without anybody uploading it again. We ran this end to end on our own Microsoft 365 account first. That covered connecting, choosing a folder, reading a OneDrive file and spotting changes.

It also handles:

Two ways to connect to Teams

If you want to try this on overflow or after hours calls, forwarding is the quick way in. Your number stays where it is and nothing gets ported. The cost is caller ID. Without the number, neither the agent nor your staff can recognise a long standing client from their phone number. If that matters to you, ask us about the native route.

The native route has a catch of its own. It only works with service numbers, so check what your main number is. Microsoft also lists a known issue with transfers. If a call reached the agent through an auto attendant or call queue, it fails when the agent transfers it to an outside number. Our agent transfers by dialling a number today. So if your call flow goes menu, then AI, then any transfer, we test and design around that first.

If you would rather connect by SIP, that option is there too. Ask us about using our SIP technology.

Three checks before you commit

Who has a phone number? Today our agent transfers by dialling a number. Plenty of Teams users have an account and no direct number of their own. For those people, transfer to a call queue number instead. Work this out before setup, because it decides how many callers you can put through.

Which folders are worth trusting? Point the agent at a whole SharePoint site and it can read a three year old price list as confidently as this month's. Choose a few folders your team maintains. It checks for changes every 30 minutes, so a price change at 10:00 may not reach the agent straight away. A Global Administrator or Privileged Role Administrator has to approve read access once. If your IT is outsourced, that approval can easily become the slowest step in the project.

Which features do you need on the same agent? SharePoint knowledge and the native Teams connection run on our newer voice engine. Not every feature has reached both engines yet. Give us your must haves, such as Outlook booking, CRM updates and transfers, and we will tell you what fits together today.

How it differs from an auto attendant or Copilot

A Teams auto attendant is a menu that routes on key presses or simple spoken choices. Keep it, and send the AI the calls a menu can't resolve. Copilot helps your staff with their own calls and meetings. Copilot Studio lets your team build agents, and your team then owns the building and tuning. An AI receptionist from Waboom AI holds the conversation with your caller, and we build and manage it for you.

What changes for your business

Routine calls can be dealt with before they interrupt anyone. Staff get a summary email rather than a voicemail, so they know what a call was about before they ring back. Nobody learns a new app, because transferred calls still ring in Teams. You can also see what people are calling about, because every call is recorded and transcribed.

A transfer still needs a person at the other end, so we spend setup time on who gets which calls and what happens when they don't answer.

Where we would start

Start with one type of call. Overflow is usually the best choice, because your team feels the difference quickly. Build the staff directory, give the agent one well kept folder or a handful of key documents, and listen to the first week of calls. Most of the useful changes come from those recordings.

On the forwarding route, the agent is usually answering within 24 hours and the Teams rule takes a few minutes. Outbound campaigns and CRM connections take longer, and we scope the native route separately. You can see how forwarding works on our Microsoft Teams integration page and what it costs on our pricing page.

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