Microsoft Teams Phone number management is one of those topics that becomes a chore.
As a result, it often gets parked until the end of your Teams deployment.
The direct result of that is you have numbers all over the place, a lack of visibility, and a lot of manual hide and seek when you need to make changes.
What is Microsoft Teams Phone number management?
Microsoft Teams Phone number management is the process, or collection of processes, used to assign, unassign, reserve, and archive telephone numbers used for external calling in Teams.
Until formalized, these processes usually live in the heads of IT admins. Once formalized, expect the introduction of documentation (to note changes, number assignments, and any special usage or treatment of numbers) and possible automation in larger businesses.
What we really should be doing is thinking about number management best practices before we deploy Teams Phone.
Whether this is in the form of Operator Connect, Direct Routing, Calling Plan, or something more exotic, you should be asking the question:
“What can I do now that will save me time and effort later on?”
Yes, it’s hard. And yes, it’s dull. Heck, before writing this blog post, I literally asked:
The response I got was a resounding “Go for it!”.
So, please watch the video below and read the responses from each of the hand-picked Teams and Callroute specialists as they share their Microsoft Teams number management best practices with you.
1 – Have a centralized and consistent data source for Teams Phone number management
Martin Heusser, Microsoft MVP and Senior M365 Engineer at Houlihan Lokey, says that when your data is stored in countless spreadsheets and maintained by different individuals, you end up with outdated, incomplete, or duplicated data.
In some cases, people don’t even know the data exists at all.
When everybody works from the same information, you’ll avoid all these problems and remove potential information barriers.
Consider a dedicated Microsoft Teams Phone number management solution to keep everyone on the same page and stop duplication of administrative tasks.
Suggested Reading: Solve Your Microsoft Teams Number Management Woes
2 – Keep contiguous numbers together for streamlined Teams Phone number management
If a number range starts at 000 and ends at 100, it’s ideal to group the users within the entire range together. This is mainly to keep them identifiable in the future.
For example, if your marketing team has an entire range assigned to them, it makes complete sense to assign a new staff member one of those numbers instead of a new one.
Likewise, if you have smaller departments, you can allocate sub-sections of that range so consecutive numbers get grouped together.
You may have a DDI range that starts 000 and ends at 100 but choose to have the following configuration:
- 000: Main inbound number
- 001 – 009: Marketing
- 010 – 019: Sales
- 020 – 039: Support
- 040 – 049: Accounts
Even if you only have 10 support staff at this moment in time, leaving space for future growth is catered to by the reservation of the extra 10 numbers allocated in the 020 – 039 range.
Using contiguous numbers helps with:
- Number porting in the future
- Administration and management
- Identification of which department a staff member belongs to
- Reassignment of numbers when staff members leave and their replacement begins
Suggested Reading: We Created A Single Pane Of Glass For Microsoft Teams Management
3 – Automate number quarantining for productive Teams Phone number management
When managing phone numbers in large enterprises, staff turnover is higher than in smaller firms. That means the amount of moves, adds, and changes is naturally higher too.
If a user leaves, what you don’t want is their phone number to return to a free-for-all pool of numbers then get assigned to the next person that joins your company.
Why?
Because if a sales user had the number ending 019, their customers will likely have their direct dial saved and call it out of habit. If you have randomly assigned that number to a new user who happens to be in accounts, your customer is getting an inferior experience to the one they’ve come to expect. You’re choosing to add an extra transfer in their call journey.
You’re also unfairly treating your new accounts user as a receptionist, asking them to forfeit time in their day to carry out the work of a phone system.
The ideal scenario is automation that quarantines a phone number when a user leaves your company, removing the chance of incorrect assignment.
Within this quarantine pool, you may have a few scenarios applied:
- Call forwarding to other sales users
- Call forwarding to a sales hunt group
- Play a message stating the user has left
- Do nothing and stay quarantined
Suggested Reading: 5 Benefits Of Automated UC Provisioning
4 – Reserve memorable numbers to speed up number assignment
Setting aside Teams phone numbers that have either a memorable number or frequently used number seems like a simple Teams number management best practice, so why doesn’t it happen?
If you have a range from 000-199, for example, you’ve got several memorable (sometimes called golden numbers) to choose from for various scenarios.
You might choose:
- 000 as your main company number
- 111 as your sales number
- 222 for a specific marketing campaign
- 5050 for a 50% off time-based offer
- 5000 set aside for another day when it would be perfect to use it
The moral of this story is to choose wisely when first assigning numbers to various users, groups, and devices.
On receiving your new range, or if you’re lucky enough to choose one from your provider, sort through nice-looking numbers and reserve them in your Microsoft Teams provisioning app.
Even better, if you can configure some rules to automate this, you can save time every time to get new numbers from Microsoft or any vendor.
Suggested Reading: We Fixed The Worst Thing About Microsoft Teams
5 – Organize numbers by meaningful location for effective Teams Phone number management
If you’ve got lots of numbers across multiple offices and different regions, they’re likely organized by area code or prefix.
This is a good start and is okay if you’ve only got one office per geographical location. But if you’ve got two New York offices, for example, organizing your New York numbers in one group doesn’t really help.
Sure, you separate them from the rest of your locations. But you’re still none the wiser about which numbers belong to which office.
The ability to customize locations and store numbers by meaningful locations means you can organize numbers by office rather than per area.
Choosing to organize your numbers by meaningful location will lead to more efficient Microsoft Teams Phone number management and less of a headache when it comes to administration.
Suggested Reading: How To Automate Microsoft Teams Number Provisioning
Use Orto for ease your Microsoft Teams Phone number management challenges
Manage all your company phone numbers in one place using Orto’s number management for Microsoft Teams; including Microsoft Calling Plans, Operator Connect and Direct Routing.
When you choose Orto for Teams Phone number management, expect:
- No more reliance on spreadsheets: Manage all your Teams numbers in one portal
- Your numbers to be up to date: Automatically update number allocation
- Full support regardless of connectivity type: Direct Routing, Calling Plan, and Operator Connect
- Automated assignment: Automatically assign numbers to your Teams users
Number management in Teams becomes a breeze when all changes are logged and flagged automatically.
If you can use a centralized tool for assignment and unassignment, you remove the need for Power Shell, complex scripts, and manual updating of systems.
You’ll have a better view of where and when your numbers are in use:
Then, when you make changes, you can reserve special numbers for re-use at a later date. Or, if these numbers are to never be used again, choose to quarantine them so nobody else can select them by mistake.
If managing phone numbers in Microsoft Teams proves a challenge, Orto is the tool to ease your pain.
For more detail on how Orto synchronizes numbers and gives you precious hours back in your day, check out our Teams number management solution here.
