Scott Plette: Um, so it will make Teams more effective working together, managing missed calls, managing shared voicemail, managing customer follow ups, but also it will provide a foundation of intelligence for enterprises to understand what's happening on their Queues, um, what they need to do to adjust. And how they can be more effective.

Tom Arbuthnot: Welcome back to the Teams insider podcast. This week, we are going deep into the Queues app. We talk a little bit about the history of where it's come from the use cases, some of the features that are coming out shortly and a little bit of a broader look at the direction it might take in terms of future features.

Many thanks to Scott, who's partner, group program manager for Teams calling and premium for taking the time to jump on the pod. He gives us a really good outline of what's happening with the Queues app. And also many thanks to Ribbon, who are the sponsor of this podcast. Really appreciate their support of everything we're doing at Empowering Cloud.

On with the show. Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast exciting one this week Probably one of the hotter topics in Microsoft Teams We're going to dive into the Queues app and it's the first time i've had Scott on the podcast as well. So welcome Scott 

Scott Plette: Thank you. I'm happy to be here. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. So, uh, really want to dive into Queues.

But first, you've had a long run at Microsoft and a lot around Teams, Teams calling. Um, so maybe you could take us a little bit through your journey with Microsoft and Microsoft Teams. 

Scott Plette: Uh, that's a long journey. I've been, I've been at Microsoft for 27 years. So, um, my start in Unified Communications really happened.

In Lynk way back when I owned a bunch of calling experiences then and mobile experiences and Lynk and then I kind of left Unified Communications for a while did a tour around the company and then Ended up coming back, uh, really just before the pandemic. So it's been about five and a half years or so.

Tom Arbuthnot: I mean, that was good timing to come back to UC. Just pre, pre pandemic ? Well, right. For the hotness? Well, or was it or was it ? 

Scott Plette: Well, no, it, it was, I mean, it was a really fun time in, in terms of work. Yeah. There was just so much to do. Um, you know, it was odd doing it all from home. But, um, yeah, I mean, things exploded at that time.

And so we grew really fast. We had a ton of work to do just to make Teams phone a credible pbx. At that time, we really weren't at the beginning of the pandemic, and it took us some time to get to a world where, you know, we had enough functionality in our cloud call control. That we were a credible PBX solution for enterprises and SMBs.

And I feel like we're at a point now where we're sort of, sort of there. There's a few features that are still remaining and you know, the the long tail of PBX features is really long. And so I don't think we're gonna do everything, everything that you've seen in a PBX. But 

Tom Arbuthnot: it's kind of interesting convergence, is it?

Because simultaneously like Teams has plugged gaps and it feels like the world is catching up to the reality of actually I don't need 270 PBX features. 

Scott Plette: Yeah, that's right. Like we used to get a bunch of feature requests that we don't get anymore. Um, and then we've also plugged some of those gaps. We still get feature requests for old PBX features.

My favorite is a call waiting beep. Call waiting feels like a feature that I remember from 1984. You know, when I was a teenager and I got called waiting at home for the first time, but those features are still there You know people who use telephony have been using it for a hundred years really And so those old habits sort of die hard and those work those workflows sort of die hard And so we always have requests for those things fax We get requests for fax and those kinds of things and I mean the truth is we won't do them all We just we just feel like it's time to transition to a more modern telephony experience, more modern communication experience.

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And tell me about the current role. 

Scott Plette: Um, so my current role? 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. 

Scott Plette: So, uh, so today I own all the calling experiences in Teams. Um, I'm also now actually driving some of the Teams premium experiences, which is where Queues actually comes in. Um, and some of the effort to drive B2C communications. So I have a team of about 15 PMs right now.

Um, leading a dev team of, I don't, jeez, I don't even know how many anymore, probably 60 or so at least. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. 

Scott Plette: Yeah, at the minimum. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's awesome. And how, so for everybody listening in, so premium, we've, we've had people on the podcast talk about different elements of premium. Premium is a, a collection of features.

So it's not like there's a separate team running premium. It's premium features going into that stack. Is that correct?

Scott Plette: That's right. You should think of premium as. Um, there's kind of three key areas where we're, we're driving premium. The first is in, um, security and protection, so things like watermarking, those kinds of things.

Um, where we're doing encryption, end to end encryptions, a couple of different features that we do in the security space. Then there's the intelligent workspace, so things like places. Um, which are, which are starting to gain some traction. And then I think, you know, the, the third place is where we start talking about external and B2C communications.

Where we really drive a lot more engagement externally. If you think of Teams today, it's really sort of an intra tenant communication tool, or at least it's thought of that way. What we'd love to do, and we're trying to do, and And what we've done to some extent with phone already is drive a lot of external communication so that all of your communication comes into Teams.

You know, part of the thinking we had around Queues app was we really need to give people a centralized place to do customer communications in the Teams experience. We had done some stabs at it before with things like voice enabled channels, but they had never really come to fruition, um, for lots of reasons.

We could, we could talk about some of that, but, um, Queues was really kind of the first effort to say, okay, In addition to external meetings, which we do today, how are we going to make it possible for teams to be much more effective communicating externally via telephony and give them a centralized place to come and do that and to manage teams that are doing that?

You know, when we started calling, we've always had call Queues. Call Queues are something that have been there from the beginning. They're very basic, right? They didn't have a ton of functionality. They're sort of, you know, I would say an MVP of call queue functionality for telephony solution. But despite the fact that they were, they were sort of nascent and not very fully, fully featured a huge uptake of them.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. And some, some people really push them, I think way beyond probably what was thinking of, I know people that have hundreds of them and hundreds of like, like hundreds of, uh, you people using them agents, whatever you want to call it. 

Scott Plette: We have customers that have hundreds of call Queues and thousands of agents.

You know, that was kind of, I would say, a little bit surprising, but as we started to realize that we kind of knew, hey, there's something here, right? The companies really need something more than just P2P calling, which I guess shouldn't be a surprise, but, um, you know, we started to hear from customers is, hey, you know, we really have sort of Two groups of people that take calls in these kind of team scenarios.

Those are our CCaaS folks who live in a CCaaS solution. It's usually web based, very information dense, knowledge based and integration, CRM integration, case management integration, these kinds of things. And then we have people that also live in UCaaS and those UCaaS folks, you know, sometimes we have to pay for CCaaS solutions for them.

Just so we can route calls to them. We don't need them to have everything the CCaaS folks have. We just need some simple routing capabilities and the ability for them to live in the experience that they live in on a day to day basis, which in this case was Teams. And so as we started to hear that, you know, we thought we need to invest more in that space so that we can make people successful.

in a UCaaS environment. And then, of course, you know, there's always price comparison things as well. So, you don't necessarily want to pay 75 to $100 a month, which is what CCaaS solutions cost. Yeah. Um, for, for simple call routing. Um, and so we sort of invested in, in Queues to really sort of attack that market, um, and help those enterprises who have departmental call Queues that are even internal call Queues, or small and medium sized businesses who do customer facing things as well.

Um, and that's kind of where Queues was born. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's really good to understand it that way as well, because it's a, it's a kind of a complex scale. We had before this, we had call Queues in the box. Now we've got Queues app with premium. We've obviously got the Teams ecosystem of contact center vendors that integrates Teams, and we've got the classic.

Big contact centers. Um, and I kind of put Dynamics 365 in that category because they, as you said, they've got their own interface. They're not Teams. They're their interface. 

Scott Plette: Yeah, for sure. And Dynamics really is the CCaaS solution for Microsoft. They have a fully functioning multimodal console that has.

A rich information dense experience. Um, we aren't looking to replace that. In fact, um, we're actually working with Dynamics quite closely to make sure we integrate with that. We provide connectivity between our experience and Dynamics experiences. Um, and over time even, even potentially power that telephony.

Um, you'll hear more about that at Enterprise Connect next week. Um, but so, so we're certainly not trying to replace Dynamics. I don't think that we can really scale to that level of, of support functionality. Most of our call Queues generally have, you know, tens of people on them and not hundreds or thousands of people.

Um, but they've been widely adopted and are used for all kinds of scenarios. Banking scenarios, hospital scenarios, just organizational scenarios and enterprises as well. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. And let's talk about what, what are the key features of Queues today. And then I'm going to quiz you on what's coming down the road.

Because I know there's some really interesting stuff coming. So what, what are we, what would you say are the highlights we get in the box of the Queues app today? 

Scott Plette: Well, it's interesting when, when we started to innovate on call queues. We built this functionality called Voice Enabled Channels. The idea was, hey, let's associate call queues with channels.

Channels are a place where Teams come together to work on a problem. Let's bring telephony to that. And so we brought a few things to the table in Voice Enabled Channels. We brought individual call history, history of calls I took on a queue, the ability to opt in and opt out of a call queue, and then to see the status of other folks on your queue.

And what we found was, Um, that solution just didn't work very well. Um, folks did not like the notion of navigating channel infrastructure to manage their call queues. So first things first, we wanted a centralized place for queues. We gave it its own app. Um, we felt like that made a lot of sense, particularly as we were seeing folks who were actually starting to be in multiple queues.

Um, some companies have folks that are in five, six, seven queues at a time. They need one place to manage it and look for it. So that's the first thing that we did. Second thing is we brought everything that was in voice enabled channels into Queues. So, opting in and opting out for agents, showing a history of calls that you took on the queue, and then we added things that we've been being asked for a whole bunch, including things like the ability for a local administrator to manage queue settings.

This was a huge ask. It started, it actually started when partners came to us and said, Hey, I manage these voice deployments for a whole bunch of companies, and every holiday they call me and say, Can you change the outgoing message on our call queues in our attendance? And it happens every holiday. And we just want you to, want to be able to delegate that responsibility.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, I'm not giving them Teams phone admin, but I do want to just give them that little button to change that thing, yeah. 

Scott Plette: Right, so we did that. That's the first thing we did in delegated administration. It was just wildly popular. So, what we did in our most recent release of Queues app, is we brought basically almost every setting of Queues.

Down to the client levels so that a local administrator can actually manage the queue. So you need to add someone to a queue, you need to remove someone to the queue, and you want to change your music on hold. Whatever you want to do, you can do now from within Teams. Which is a piece of flexibility that we didn't have before.

And then, the other two key things we brought were sort of live stats. So you can see, What is our current abandonment rate of calls? How long are people waiting? Basically, you have a view into the queue state that we never had before. We didn't have any kind of visible state, uh, uh, of a queue. Um, and then historical reporting that lets you kind of look at how you're doing over time and compare, you know, one day to the next.

What's interesting about that, so that's, that was sort of our basic MVP of call queues. And what we're seeing is pretty great, broad adoption, mostly though by supervisor scenario. Supervisors come in and they use it to do monitoring of live queues, historical reporting, and management. It hasn't started to take off yet with agents, and we sort of knew that was going to be the case, because there's a bunch of functionality that we want to build in the agent space to drive agent adoption and make agents much more efficient over time.

And that will come over the course of the next year or so. Um, Supervisors so far do love it and we're getting tons of great reviews and a lot of positive feedback about the ability to manage queues in a manner that we haven't been able to do before. The next feature we're shipping for, um, Supervisors probably be out in April timeframe is Barge Whisper and Monitor.

So the ability to jump in on a call and help an agent. Or whisper to an agent that's having trouble with a customer. So you'll have that sort of next level of monitoring. 

Tom Arbuthnot: That's a really big feature. Like that's a feature you would have historically been at the, you know, you said the $75 plus mark to get into that game.

Scott Plette: It's, it's a feature. It's a feature. It was like our first big, it was the first. Piece of feedback we heard. What's funny though, is everyone we talked to originally was a supervisor, right? It was like an admin. So of course they want barge whisper. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that's the feature they want to check on their people or help.

Scott Plette: Exactly. So, so like agents, agents don't barge in on each other, right? So, so as we, as we move past those sort of supervisor features, I think the really interesting stuff comes. When we get into the agent space, when we, when we do things that help agents and that list is, is really kind of growing on a daily basis.

Some of it I think of as sort of baseline stuff and I can talk about what those are. And then some of it I think of as advanced functionality that we'll add over time. So the biggest, there's two big things that agents want before they start adopting it. A, a number of companies who kind of are kind of, you know, chomping at the bit to deploy to their agents.

The first is a little bit better. Functionality around opting in and opting out of queues. Particularly in hospital scenarios, what you hear is Hey, we have a bunch of doctors and nurses that come online there on five to six queues and they forget to opt in or they leave and go home. They forget to opt out.

So we want some ability to automate that functionality. And we're in the process right now of integrating with Microsoft shifts so that you can actually set up work shifts. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, interesting. 

Scott Plette: Yeah, so if you put a, if you put a doctor or a nurse on a shift, when their shift starts, they're automatically opted in, when their shift ends, they're automatically opted out.

Um, so that's coming in the, in the next semester or so. Um, and then additionally, they want the ability for, to have each other opt, opt in and opt out. So, uh, my, you know, my co worker had to leave in an emergency, I'm going to opt her out of the queue, that kind of thing. So that's just sort of an availability control, um, convenience that they also want.

On mobile, right? Mobile devices and Queues on mobile are a big part of this as well. If you look at banking scenarios, um, hospital scenarios, um, some retail scenarios, you have employees walking around with their mobile phone. 

Tom Arbuthnot: It's also just part of the, part of the Teams story, isn't it? Right? It's like, I work from different endpoints.

I kind of expect uniformity of experience. And Queues app is an experience. 

Scott Plette: Yeah. So being able to get all of those, we've always routed call queue calls to mobile phones, but we don't have yet. A Queues app on mobile that gives you that kind of rich engagement functionality that you need to sort of control your experience.

So those two things I think are big ones for agents. And then the biggest one, and the one I think is going to unlock a lot more interesting scenarios is what we call shared call history. So today, if you go to the call queue and you look at one of the queues you're on, you'll see a history of all queues, calls that you took on the queue.

But what you really want to be able to do is see all the calls that came in on the queue. Then I see interesting things like, oh, my coworker Tom missed a call yesterday or, or took a call yesterday and took these few notes on this call. He's out today. I'm gonna be able to go back to that call queue, see that he missed the call or see that he had some follow up action items on the call and help Tom out.

Um, and be able to actually react to notes that he took on calls or, or actions that were a result of, of calls that he took with customers. Um, and shared call history is sort of a huge investment on our part. Um, it's been something we've been working on for the last, so six months or so. I'd expect to see it in the second half of this year.

Um, It is also a place where I expect us to innovate over time. So, if you're familiar with Copilot on calling today, you're able to record 

Tom Arbuthnot: You beat me to it. I felt like this is like the place where AI can really add significant value. It's more like where are you going to draw the line? Because it's so interesting.

Scott Plette: That's right. So, once you can record and transcribe every call on a call queue, now you get really interesting scenarios because you get automated recaps. You get the ability for agents to say, Oh, what happened on that call? Tom took yesterday and you can see that all automatically. So we want to live in a world where enterprises can choose to apply policy to Queues and say things like record and transcribe every call on this queue, right?

And sometimes that might be for training purposes, but sometimes it might be for intelligence purposes. I'm going to get a lot of information about customers that are calling and then over time you can start to imagine where we might go. Hey, I looked at the call queues for the last week and I'm noticing these trends from your customers.

That's the kind of thing that we see is intelligent experiences to build on top of call queues. Hey, it looks like you didn't have enough agents online. Friday between two and four and you and and you know our analysis suggests that you're going to need more this Friday as well Those types of trend analysis is just from from a workforce management perspective But also from a customer perspective are you know the obvious place for us to go?

So it'll make Teams more effective working together managing missed calls managing shared voicemail managing Customer follow ups, but also it will provide a foundation of intelligence for enterprises to understand what's happening on their queues Um what they need to do to adjust and how they can be more effective over time.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah, that's really interesting There's significant value there both in the as you say the AI Helping you understand the analytics side like simplifying that for you but actually if you're going to go into the data insights, it's super interesting to be what are the Trending topic. We set this queue up for reason X, but what does it actually get used for?

Exactly. What are the trending topics? 

Scott Plette: Right. And, uh, and other scenarios as well. So, um, I pick up a call on a queue. Wouldn't it be nice if I got a little report that said, Hey, uh, last time this customer called He was talking to Tom about X, Y, and Z. He has this many of your products and you know His last customer sentiment was negative or positive.

Um, it just informs me, it gives me context about the customer calling. It makes me, it makes it much more, uh, effective for me to communicate with them. So over time, I, you can think of a lot of different of these intelligence scenarios, and they'll take us some time to build, but it's sort of the obvious direction that we'll end up going as we get smarter and smarter, um, and we're building those types of Co pilot scenarios on top of calling 

Tom Arbuthnot: that's really cool.

Just looping back to the barge and whisper and monitor If I'm right, this is the first time the call capability to diverging from native call queues because today It's really the same but with UI is that but now we barge and whispering change the media 

Scott Plette: It's the first time we've allowed that type of functionality Um, yeah, that's true.

Yeah, we did have so we have a shared line appearance functionality today where you can, you can have a delegate manage calls on your behalf and we did bring barge to that experience. So if you're a boss, you see your delegate on a call, you can see that call state, you can jump into a call. Um, so we're sort of building on that, but it's sort of the next phase of things, right?

We're going to be a little bit more complex. Then just barging in, we're going to be able to listen in or be able to make comments. 

Tom Arbuthnot: I'm guessing that was a pretty big engineering effort because you're doing. Back end stuff now to this person can hear but can't see this person can talk to this person, but I can't think of a scenario where we've mucked media in a like this person can hear, but this person can't type scenario.

Scott Plette: Yeah, it's it's been a long time in development. It's not a I mean, it's not a new feature in the CCaaS world, right? Something that's been there for some time, but but for us, it is, um, it's been, you know, we had kind of been doing it as we got to the first version of Queues and. And we decided when we got where we did with Queues that we could release without this functionality if we fast followed.

And so I think Queues was out October, November of last year. Um, and bar twist for monitors probably about a month away, so not too far after. Um, I'm excited for that. I want to see how people begin to use it. Um, I'm sort of, I guess we've been developing that one for a while, so I'm not as excited about it as some of the other things that we're going to do for agents.

Tom Arbuthnot: Yeah. 

Scott Plette: Particularly mobile queues and shared call history. Um, but it is, it is exciting to see that come online quickly. You know, one of the things that, that when we release voice enabled channels we sort of, We let it stagnate a little bit too long. Um, we had a whole bunch of other things that were going on from our, from our phone perspective.

And I feel like this time with Queues, we're really focused on expanding B2C communication and making it more effective. And most of that is because, you know, we've got that foundation, that solid foundation with phone now. We're not building all those kind of old PBX features anymore. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Oh, and we've had this conversation. I feel like when something, when Microsoft brings something new to the market, there's kind of eyes on, like, did it get enough traction to get enough love to keep having features? It's nice to see the roadmap features coming through to kind of be like, this feels like a. A safe bet to come on the journey with Microsoft or more is going to come. 

Scott Plette: Yeah customers are like the other thing is we're getting great validation from customers, right?

So that sort of feedback that we get from customers Um, it is what drives us And the excitement around Queues is pretty palpable 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Well, Scott, that was a great insight. I think we're going to grab some of your team and do a deep dive on like config and set up some bits and pieces. But I really appreciate your perspective.

And maybe we can give you a bit of time to ship some of those those other AI features and get you back to talk about those. 

Scott Plette: Yeah, absolutely. When we get some of that new stuff out, let's talk again. It'll be it'll be great. 

Tom Arbuthnot: Awesome. Thanks so much, Scott. 

Scott Plette: Thank you, Tom.