Successfully Integrating Microsoft Teams into the Call Center

Author: Irwin Lazar, President & Principal Analyst For years, IT and customer experience (CX) leaders have operated in largely separate spheres, managing distinct platforms for internal collaboration and external customer engagement. Over the years Metrigy has tracked growing integration of unified communications (UC) and contact center, especially from providers offering a fully integrated platform. But with most organizations now relying on Microsoft Teams for all or part of their UC stack, there is growing interest in integrating it with the contact center, enabling agents to leverage Teams for communicating with each other, supervisors, and back-office staff when resolving customer inquiries. The question is no longer if those organizations using Teams integrate it with their contact center, but how they can do so to drive measurable business value. Additionally, Teams Phone, especially with the add-on Queues app for Teams, supports features for managing inbound calling that allows Teams to function as a lightweight contact center for some use cases, leading IT and business leaders to question where they can use Teams for inbound call management, and where they need a more robust solution provided by a dedicated contact center platform. This Metrigy issue paper provides findings from our Q2 2025 Microsoft Teams in the Contact Center study, for which we gathered data from 197 IT and CX leaders in the U.K. and U.S. Our research reveals a clear and compelling correlation between the strategic integration of Teams and tangible business success. Nearly 80% of participating companies saw business benefits from using Teams in the last year across a variety of areas, as shown in the paper. This issue paper will provide data-driven, actionable guidance on navigating this new landscape. We will explore the state of Teams adoption, dissect various integration strategies, evaluate the use of Teams Phone as a native call management platform, and analyze the underlying PSTN ©Metrigy Research Corp., 2025 www.metrigy.com 4 architecture. Crucially, we will highlight the differing strategies of our Research Success Group—the 35 companies in our study that achieved above-average gains in revenue, cost savings, and/or productivity—to provide a blueprint for success.

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Table of Contents

• Introduction
• The State of Play: Teams Adoption and the Drive to Integrate
• Navigating the Integration Landscape
  • Who Owns the Strategy?
  • Choosing an Integration Model
• Teams as Contact Center Platform: Is it Enough?
• Bridging the Gap via the Queues App for Teams
• Unifying Teams Phone and Contact Center PSTN Management
• Recommendations
• Working With Metrigy