Avant: Microsoft Teams Customers Look for Better Voice OutcomesAvant: Microsoft Teams Customers Look for Better Voice Outcomes

As Microsoft Teams' market share for unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) continues to grow, so does the opportunity for third-party voice integrations.

Avant's 6-12 UCaaS State of Disruption Report sheds light on the massive presence of Teams in business environments while pointing to a key caveat: the low percentage of customers that are using Teams for voice.

Avant notes from Microsoft's 2024 first-quarter fiscal year earnings that an estimated 80 million users conduct voice calls using Teams. Out of an estimated 320 million active Teams users, that's 25%, but voice calls don't necessarily equate to enterprise-grade voice. Avant notes Microsoft's statistic that 20 million of its users are "PSTN-enabled" with a Microsoft Phone System license and a calling plan, or through a third-party Direct Routing partner. In other words, Avant estimates that 6% are using Microsoft Teams to connect to the PSTN, otherwise known as the public switched telephone network.

"We've seen over the past several years this massive adoption of Teams," said Andrew Pryfogle, leader of market development for Avant. "What's been fascinating is, if you look at the tens of millions of seats out there at Microsoft Teams, there's a fraction of those that are actually voice-enabled."

Related:Microsoft Leads Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant, But There's a Catch

Avant suggests that as many as 85% of Teams users that connect to PSTN services are using third-party UCaaS providers. Zoom, RingCentral, 8x8, Dialpad and Vonage are just a few of these providers that are viewing Teams users as an addressable market for voice services.

Avant's Andrew Pryfogle

"They've seen a bunch of their customers go away and deploy pure Team solutions thinking that was sufficient. And now those customers are starting to figure out that that plan didn't work," Pryfogle said.

Microsoft Teams Voice

Many enterprises turn to Teams due to its integration with the larger Office 365 portfolio. And while the platform's chat, collaboration, video and file sharing have proven "powerful" for users, the question of voice has taken a back seat, Pryfogle said. Some firms have elected to simply not enable PSTN, thinking that employees will use the basic voice-calling feature. According to Pryfogle, many of those employees end up simply using their cellphones to make calls.

"If my employees are using cellphones for their voice communications, I lose all visibility to those communications. I no longer have transcripts. I can't hear the voice of my customer. I can't report on it. I don't have CRM data. When that employee leaves, they walk out with all my most valuable customer information. That has been an unintended consequence of this massive adoption of Teams and people just assuming that it will handle voice. It doesn't do a great job at handling voice, and the unintended consequence of that is, employees don't use it for voice," Pryfogle said.

Related:New Microsoft CCaaS Offering: Threat to the Channel?

As a result, more enterprises with a Teams base are looking at UCaaS companies that can integrate PSTN services into Teams, he said.

For the technology advisor community, many of whom have been successful in sourcing UCaaS solutions for their customers, Microsoft has always been a question mark. Advisor-friendly vendors like Zoom grew at a rapid rate during the COVID-19 pandemic, but Teams adoption has steadily eaten into the market over the years. And although advisor-friendly vendors integrate voice with Microsoft, advisors can't earn the same type of commissions on a full-Microsoft UCaaS solution.

However, the voice element of Teams is creating opportunity for these partners, Avant chief strategy officer Alex Danyluk said.

Avant's Alex Danyluk

"What often happens with a trusted advisor is, when they walk in and they see Teams, they get a little concerned," Danyluk told Channel Futures. "They don't know how to approach it. And in some sense, it's because the only story that the customer hears is the Microsoft story. We need to help trusted advisors understand that when you see the Teams solution and someone's thinking about voice, that is a huge opportunity."

Room for UCaaS Market Growth

Avant surveyed more than 500 IT buyers about their unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) deployment plans. The data shows that cloud-based UC has grown significantly since the start of the pandemic. Fifty-eight percent of U.S. companies with more than $1 million in annual revenue are already using UCaaS, compared to a pre-pandemic number of 47%.

Respondents were asked to list the percentage of their phones that were cloud-based versus premises-based at three points in time: before the pandemic, in 2024, and what they think it will be 12 months into the future. The study notes that the smallest segment ($1 million-$10 million in revenue) grew at nearly the same rate as the largest segment (more than $1 billion in revenue). The study found that the $50 million-$100 million range grew 9.6% from pre-pandemic to 2024, making it a hot segment.

Source: Avant's "The UCaaS State of Disruption Report"

The most common reason (42%) IT decision-makers had not yet moved to UCaaS was "the learning curve." The next common problem was that businesses reported bandwidth issues at particular sites that would hamper UCaaS performance. That's a concern many tech advisors could quell, as many of them consult on and source connectivity. Danyluk said connectivity is the most common "second sale" for advisors after UC.

Source: Avant's "The UCaaS State of Disruption Report"

The third most common reason was that their legacy contracts would punish them if they left their current platform.

The Avant Analytics division produced the report, with data from its interactive quick assessments (IQAs), survey data from IT purchasers and input from its engineering team.