Today’s guest blogger is Tracy Urbina, UC Solutions Engineer

These are not ALL considerations, be sure to do your due diligence and understand your business requirements before building your platform. This is consideration after you have fully designed and have approval on your call flows including time of day routing.

Microsoft Teams Auto Attendants and Call Queues require unique users, which are called Resource Accounts to be created and sometimes licensed to be assigned to the applications.  Before creating these accounts, you want to think ahead of how you will be able to easily identify, associate, and manage these accounts.

You also should understand the order in which to do these tasks so that your build is complete and you do not need to start over at any point or go back to finish if you have not done the prior steps required.

When you create the Resource Accounts you are required to choose the type of application the account will be assigned to, a Call Queue or an Auto Attendant. This gives it a unique application identifier code and you will need to be sure to assign the proper resource account to the proper type of application, a Call Queue or Auto Attendant. This can get tricky if you do not first prepare by knowing your naming conventions and how you will build your call flows.

Once you have designated your Naming Convention “ServiceDesk” will be our example, start by naming your resource accounts and work backward to name the Call Queues, then the Auto Attendants.

Helping to easily identify the TYPE of Resource Account we will use CQ for Call Queue account identifiers and AA as Auto Attendant account identifiers.

Begin by knowing who your agents will be in the Call Queue.

Create your O365 Group of users that will be Agents. You may use existing O365 groups, but if creating a new group, keep within your naming conventions.

1. Create O365 Group “ServiceDesk_CQ_Agents”

Then create your Resource accounts

1. Create Resource account ServiceDeskCQ@cortana.onmicrosoft.com (CallQueue)
2. Create Resource account ServiceDeskAA@cortana.onmicrosoft.com (AutoAttendant)

You will then easily be able to find which resource accounts needs to be associated with either the Auto attendant or the Call queue.

Create Call Queue

1. Create and Name your Call Queue “ServiceDesk_CQ”
2. Associate Resource account ServiceDeskCQ@cortana.onmicrosoft.com to Call Queue

Associate your O365 Group of agents and add the O365 Group Voicemail feature “ServiceDesk_CQ_Agents”

Create Auto Attendant

1. Create and Name your Auto Attendant “ServiceDesk_AA”
2. Associate Resource account ServiceDeskAA@cortana.onmicrosoft.com to Auto Attendant
3. Associate your call queue to whatever option you chose.

This process should keep your IVR clean and easier to manage. It will also help administrators identify the Resource Accounts users in your O365 admin center and their purpose.

If you need some help with some of the more advanced features in Teams, contact us below.