When making the decision of whether to go for Direct Routing vs Operator Connect, you need to understand what’s in it for you.
Both as a business and as an IT team tasked with looking after day-to-day Teams Phone management.
In this blog post, we run through the top 15 (and there are definitely more) benefits of Microsoft Teams Direct Routing.
Benefits of Microsoft Teams Direct Routing
- Choose your own provider
- Pain-free migration
- Customization possibilities
- Cost efficiency
- Tailored plan to suit your unique business needs
- High availability and solid reliability
- Shared SLA
- Benefit from Teams expertise
- Ease of management
- Increased scalability
- Holistic view into usage
- Improved security
- Adds PBX features not available via Microsoft
- Dedicated support
- You get to deal with Callroute’s lovely team
1- Choose your own provider
The overriding benefit of Direct Routing is choice.
You’re not locked into a single provider (i.e. Microsoft) for all your phone and collaboration needs.
This means you unlock the possibilities any other Direct Routing partner provides, like PBX features you may need to reach parity with your existing phone system. Or it could be a contact center module you’ve relied on for decades.
If there’s something you genuinely need but isn’t available via consuming Microsoft Teams as your PBX and your calling operator, consider Direct Routing for a more flexible PBX deployment.
As with Operator Connect too, you can also benefit from existing discounted minutes bundles here, too. While Microsoft Calling Plan offers a great solution for users of few minutes and Shared Calling is a viable option for those who make extremely few calls individually, Direct Routing allows you to leverage all your prior negotiations and save money on calls.
2 – Pain-free migration
When you opt for Direct Routing as a Service (DRaaS), you’re effectively outsourcing all the heavy lifting to a service provider.
This means you can put your feet up and trust in the expertise of the Teams subject matter experts you’ve appointed.
Okay, so not quite that easy. But you get the point.
DRaaS means you no longer have to manage your phone system environment. Instead of maintaining hardware that needs constant attention, and instead of configuring DID by DID on migration day, leave it to the people you’re paying a monthly subscription to.
Everything you need should be included in the DRaaS price per month.
Don’t know who to appoint?
Check the full Direct Routing partner list here.
3 – Customization possibilities
Unlike sticking with Microsoft Calling Plan (which has plenty of benefits), choosing Direct Routing means you have a wider range of PBX possibilities. This is especially important if you have complex routing requirements or need to add coverage in regions outside of Microsoft’s supported locations.
If feature parity with your existing PBX is your goal, Direct Routing is a must over Microsoft Calling Plans.
The high-level differences are:
Microsoft Calling Plan | Direct Routing |
Activate quickly | Requires planning and setup |
Access in Teams Admin Center | Possible to integrate with line of business apps |
Good for basic calling requirements | Good for complex requirements |
Regular monthly billing | Covers regions outside of Microsoft Calling Plan |
Per user billing | Achieve feature parity with previous phone system |
4 – Cost efficiency
As a result of opting for your own provider, you’re going to save money.
There. We said it. Yes, it breaks so many rules of marketing. But you are going to save money on call and maintenance costs compared to other more expensive options.
Bundled international minutes, value-add features, and discounts for long-term contracts are all real things. So, let’s not pretend we don’t want to talk about them.
Price is still the primary influencer of purchasing decisions. That’s why we talk about it. There’s no point getting to the end of your evaluation process to find out you’re not going to save as much money as you thought.
5 – Tailored plan to suit your unique business needs
When you have moving goalposts, constant moves, adds, and changes, you need immediate access. The Teams Admin Center (TAC) does a good job of this.
But what about those intricate changes that need to be made at a deeper level. Or those more complex changes that require a reworking of your network topography?
When something moves and it has an impact on the rest of your business technology, you need to make sure you can do so with confidence, and everything gets documented.
If you have bespoke needs that differ from the average Teams Phone customer, let Direct Routing be the enabler, rather than fighting workarounds.
6 – High availability and solid reliability
Simply turning on calling in Teams means you get access to…exactly that. The basic calling functionality. Whether you opt for Calling Plan or Operator Connect, you get what you’re given from that provider.
Your phone system is supported by Microsoft.
Your calling is supported by your chosen operator.
But what about business continuity? What happens when one office suffers an outage, and you need to divert calls to a new office? Have you considered automatic failover?
These are all questions that get appeased when you choose Direct Routing. With more granularity over what happens when, you can create a high availability, automatically backed up solution so you have the ultimate reliable phone system setup.
Have complex business continuity requirements?
Book a free consultation with our Teams experts.
7 – Shared SLA
Let’s talk about uptime and service level agreements.
While Microsoft announced its 99.999% uptime guarantee in March 2024, it needs some unpacking to fully understand it.
99.999% does not apply to voice calls, only the Teams Phone service. That means that the phone service will be available 99.999% of the time. Painfully, this doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to make crystal clear calls using said phone service.
This means you need a third party to deliver your calling SLA.
Now, you might still choose this to be Microsoft via its Calling Plan option. But this SLA is separate (99.9%).
- And that only applies on wired ethernet connections.
- And that only applies when you’re using Microsoft-certified IP phones.
It becomes obvious that one of the benefits of Direct Routing is using a third party to split the SLA of calling and phone services. We won’t insult your intelligence by telling you how.
8 – Benefit from Teams expertise
When selecting your Direct Routing vendor, you’re also opening the door to multiple fonts of wisdom.
Sure, you might know a thing or two about Teams. But most Direct Routing partners have specialized Teams resource who do this day in day out.
It almost seems crazy not to utilize this free help.
💡💡 Pro Tip: When shortlisting providers, check for staff who are active on social media, evangelizing Microsoft Teams and collaboration tech. Not only is it in their company’s best interest for your implementation to go smoothly, but it’s also in their personal best interests.
Cross-reference the list of Teams influencers to get to know folks in the Teams community.
9 – Ease of management
When you choose a DRaaS provider, they look after the day-to-day management. There’s no need for you to concern yourself with monitoring or uptime.
But what if you need to onboard new users? And make a change at a moment’s notice?
Well, you’ve normally got two options:
- Raise a ticket
- Access a management portal
Depending on your appetite for in-house management, you can benefit from value-add services like a single pane of glass for Teams management.
Our Teams management tool, Orto, grants you access to the following:
- Phone Number Manager: A single place to manage your numbers.
- Call Queue Management: Add agents to call queues without PowerShell.
- User Personas: Create Teams policy personas for each user role.
- Bulk Migration Tools: Speed up your process when someone changes departments, locations, or job role.
- Service Management Integration: With tools like Zendesk, ServiceNow, and Workday.
10 – Increased scalability
When you’ve got access to automated Teams provisioning, a wealth of Teams expertise, and hosted infrastructure that’s no longer confined to your comms cabinet, you can scale as you wish.
This might be adding tons of new users following a merger or acquisition. You could argue that all the cloud PBX options are good for this when it comes to Teams Phone.
But it could also be downsizing. Here, you don’t have the regret of paying upfront for on-site equipment if you’ve opted for DRaaS. Instead, users get deleted, numbers get quarantined, and you carry on as you were.
11 – Holistic view into usage
In the TAC, and in Teams in general, your reporting options are somewhat limited.
Customers coming from traditional phone systems are used to having detailed reporting at their fingertips. Teams provides a good level of reporting in the Teams Admin Center and Call Quality Dashboard. However, for some customers, these may lack the in-depth detail, frequency, and historic retention those customers need.
- Mark Vale, Chief Product Officer at Callroute.
When you choose a Direct Routing partner, ask about the possible reporting options available. Third-party providers like Akixi and Tollring provide valuable add-ons for a host of Teams partners. These are often rolled into the overall Direct Routing package.
If you’ve got that single pane of glass for Teams management, expect a thorough reporting suite to give you insight into your PSTN usage.
12 – Improved security
Features like end-to-end encryption for PSTN calls and PCI compliance for payments don’t come as standard with Teams Phone.
This means if you have any industry-specific compliance regulations, you must seek a third-party provider for your calling requirements.
13 – Adds PBX features not available via Microsoft
Compared to Microsoft Calling Plan and Operator Connect, Direct Routing delivers a significant number of features without needing clunky third-party plugins:
- Lack of call recording: This can create compliance and quality control issues.
- No call reporting: Can’t see individual team member use rates or control costs individually.
- Limited queue capabilities: Limited to 200 people and only offers a waiting period of 45 minutes.
- Endpoint/handset compatibility: Rely on a limited number of compatible devices.
- Insufficient routing: No customized skill-based options.
- Inability to unify phone numbers: Can’t unify phone numbers. Instead, you’ll generate a number for each Teams account, creating redundant infrastructures and more complicated workflows.
14 – Dedicated support
When you go direct to Microsoft, the majority of your support will be via the TAC. And that’s absolutely fine for some businesses. The self-service, easy access approach works for a reason.
But that’s why Microsoft also enable Direct Routing partners.
For those roll outs that need meticulous planning upfront and support for ongoing changes, you can lean on a partner that has your best interests in mind.
The longer they keep you happy, the longer they keep you as a client.
Everyone has bills to pay, after all.
15 – You get to deal with Callroute’s lovely team
While the technology behind the scenes is undoubtedly marvellous, it’s the people you’re going to be dealing with.
We don’t think enough partners put enough emphasis on that.
So have a peak into who you’ll meet at Callroute and what we stand for: https://callroute.com/callroute/about/
Sold on the benefits of Direct Routing?
Final Reading: 👉 Direct Routing Made Easy