Manage your office calls through Microsoft Teams

As a difficult 2020 draws to a close, one thing is certain – many of the practices that were pressed into action during the year are likely to become lasting habits. The most prominent is working from home. This brings a unique challenge, among many challenges, for businesses looking to thrive in this so-called new normal.

While many employees will have been familiar with a collaboration tool, such as Microsoft Teams, to carry out video conferences, share and edit files, and manage workflow, they are still relying on their own mobile phones for calls.

Since they are out of the office, it may seem easier to call someone directly on the mobile. However, this is not always ideal because of privacy concerns as well as the cost of higher tariffs over time.

Another issue is the gradual re-opening of workplaces, which means many employees will be slowly returning to their offices on some days. Eventually, a flexible home-office arrangement may become common.

To ensure that employees are productive and collaboration is effective wherever a person is working at, there needs to be a better way to manage calls so their business contacts can keep in touch always. For example, can an employee receive calls from Microsoft Teams on his company phone system as well as his mobile phone app, seamlessly?

In other words, how can a business bridge the traditional PBX systems that have worked well all this while with a collaboration tool such as Microsoft Teams? Cloud-based communications is the answer here. By providing an easy way to answer calls in Microsoft Teams, businesses will allow them to worry less about the tools and get on with the job.

Indeed, what has been missing for many Microsoft Teams users is a way to quickly call contacts, say, on their business phone number that is connected to the existing public switched telephone network (PSTN). This is what SmartSIP for Teams Calling offers.

SmartSIP for Teams Calling is a cloud telephony solution that integrates businesses’ phone systems with Microsoft Teams, enabling users to make and receive telephone calls external to their organisation right from Teams.

StarHub SmartSIP is a scalable, reliable and high capacity business voice service delivered over an IP network. And by integrating SmartSIP with Microsoft’s collaboration tool enables collaborative teams to have all their communications and work in one place.

StarHub’s offering helps unify communications and collaboration tools into a single one dashboard, enabling users to quickly get work done instead of swapping between interfaces.

SmartSIP for Teams Calling brings more flexible ways of working, so users are able to transfer calls on their office line from any Teams-enabled device with an Internet connection.

With a software client on mobile phone, tablet, PC or other device, they can easily initiate or answer a call on the go. Similarly, a call can be routed to their office number if they are at their office desk.

One big benefit of StarHub's solution is its flexibility. Businesses can roll out to selected users who need the service most, for example, those working remotely, before rolling it out progressively to other users. 

With its flexibility and performance, it is no surprise that the cloud telephony market is projected to grow 8.9 per cent in 2020 and 17.8 per cent in 2021, according to research firm Gartner.

Cloud telephony not only makes things easier to manage but also protects against issues like toll fraud, for example. Plus, the scalability will be important to cater to unexpected events as the Covid-19 situation evolves. No more headaches when moving office.

With StarHub’s solution, businesses run their Teams service on the cloud via Microsoft’s Office 365 offering, while enjoying the stable, trusted connectivity that the telecom operator offers with its business-class SIP trunk.

Since it runs on the cloud, there is no worry about disrupting any network infrastructure or hardware failure and downtime. Businesses can enjoy a very robust and fault resilient voice and collaboration solution. 

StarHub will also be the point of contact to manage the communications solution, so there is no need to troubleshoot with various providers to solve an issue, if one arises.

For many businesses, this is easier than trying to build their own platform by integrating various components into a coherent whole.

Certainly, StarHub’s connectivity solution with Teams offers a neater way to start moving unified communications onto the cloud to enjoy the technology’s full benefits and slowly achieve considerable cost savings as they phase out legacy on-premise PBX equipment.

All a business has to do is get onboard Teams, get the right licence to access telephony services and have StarHub take care of moving the phone numbers over.

Discover how to StarHub’s new solution can power up your cloud communications efforts, at starhub.com/smartsip-teams-calling.