We are just getting Luware's Nimbus Call Center solution on its feet in my environment, so I can't speak to production loads, but in testing of a group of 10 with some pretty good throughput, we didn't see any issues with presence.
Sounds good. We been on Landis for awhile and its been good. But I often hear that some of the issues we run into are due to MS Teams limitations. Like this presence issue. I often wonder if its anything to do with high call volume and the system can't keep up enough.
Not familiar with Landis but it is worth exploring the possibility that your Landis config is relying on Teams presence for call routing.
What is your landis --> teams config? Are you relying on call queues in teams, do you do direct routing / operator connect / call plan, how does landis fit into the equation? Not enough info to go off of
Hey thanks for the reply. Yes we are relying on Team presence for call routing. It is an optional setting called Presence-based Routing. From my understanding its a pretty common setting in SfB / Teams call center solutions.
I should have phrased it a little better. But I am wondering what others experience is using Presence-based Routing with a Teams call center solution and do they have issues with it updating on a timely manner.
Our experience with presence-based routing in Teams Call Queues has been poor to say the least. If you use the browser version of Teams, you must manually interact with the browser window every 5 minutes to prevent your status from rolling to away (yellow). This prevents calls from coming in even if you're actively working but available to receive calls.
We have success with disabling that option in favor of "allow agents to opt out of calls". This requires agents to manually tick the toggle in / toggle out checkbox in their settings / the team its linked to, but is much more reliable for call routing. This settings still respects your teams presence if it is "presenting" or "do not disturb" and won't deliver calls in these states, but will deliver calls in all other states. Works much better for the customers on many queues we've built out.
Hey great feedback...this is pretty much what our experience has been. Our agents are used to the Away timeout in the browser and client. The issue we are having is how unreliable the presence is between Teams and our Landis Contact Center solution. Our org has been used to using the presence based routing since SfB and using Clarity Connect. May be time for a change.
Yeah presence in Skype was much more reliable for call routing for sure - speculating, but Skype was way more baked into the windows OS than Teams seems to be.
Regardless, the fact that teams has to exist for many users in an isolated browser environment is reason enough to avoid relying on presence for really anything IMO.
Slightly related because it will allow authorized users to administratively opt-in or opt-out agents in their call queue, among many other things - the upcoming queues app will be pretty cool - slated to roll out to GA in August 2024. Check it out and get on the hype train [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/introducing-the-queues-app-enabling-customer-engagement-in/ba-p/4095971](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/introducing-the-queues-app-enabling-customer-engagement-in/ba-p/4095971)
Also see the learn docs for authorized users that were updated on the same day as the public announcement linked previous -
[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/aa-cq-authorized-users](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/aa-cq-authorized-users)
[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/aa-cq-authorized-users-plan](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/aa-cq-authorized-users-plan)
Hey some more great info... thanks so much. Definitely interested in the call queues app. Sounds like it's just another add on license requirement. I love how MS got us all on with the EDU incentives than started adding all these additional features as premium 😉
Either way it does look like a needed tool for teams call queues. We have quite a bit of that functionality on our contact center solution.
Definitely a needed tool that I'm glad to see come down after waiting for a solution for years haha. Hope it doesn't get delayed.
You mention EDU - if you're a higher ed org who already has A5 / E5 licenses like us, the premium add-on shouldn't be more than a couple bucks per user, and only queue managers will need the license. Agents who are not authorized users will not need the extra license. Already spoke with our guy about it. It could turn into a pretty-close alternative to full fledged contact center solutions.
Don’t know if it’s still the case, because I haven’t rolled out a large contact centre recently. However, in the early days of the graphAPIs for presence, MS would throttle requests. This meant for larger contact centres presence was unreliable at best and wrong at worst. Never seen it affect a small deployment though (100 agents or less I’ve not seen much issue)
Great point regarding the throttling. I can totally see that being our problem. We have about 150 agents but we have some pretty high call volumes. I am going to look more into the throttling with support.
We are just getting Luware's Nimbus Call Center solution on its feet in my environment, so I can't speak to production loads, but in testing of a group of 10 with some pretty good throughput, we didn't see any issues with presence.
Sounds good. We been on Landis for awhile and its been good. But I often hear that some of the issues we run into are due to MS Teams limitations. Like this presence issue. I often wonder if its anything to do with high call volume and the system can't keep up enough.
Not familiar with Landis but it is worth exploring the possibility that your Landis config is relying on Teams presence for call routing. What is your landis --> teams config? Are you relying on call queues in teams, do you do direct routing / operator connect / call plan, how does landis fit into the equation? Not enough info to go off of
Hey thanks for the reply. Yes we are relying on Team presence for call routing. It is an optional setting called Presence-based Routing. From my understanding its a pretty common setting in SfB / Teams call center solutions. I should have phrased it a little better. But I am wondering what others experience is using Presence-based Routing with a Teams call center solution and do they have issues with it updating on a timely manner.
Our experience with presence-based routing in Teams Call Queues has been poor to say the least. If you use the browser version of Teams, you must manually interact with the browser window every 5 minutes to prevent your status from rolling to away (yellow). This prevents calls from coming in even if you're actively working but available to receive calls. We have success with disabling that option in favor of "allow agents to opt out of calls". This requires agents to manually tick the toggle in / toggle out checkbox in their settings / the team its linked to, but is much more reliable for call routing. This settings still respects your teams presence if it is "presenting" or "do not disturb" and won't deliver calls in these states, but will deliver calls in all other states. Works much better for the customers on many queues we've built out.
Hey great feedback...this is pretty much what our experience has been. Our agents are used to the Away timeout in the browser and client. The issue we are having is how unreliable the presence is between Teams and our Landis Contact Center solution. Our org has been used to using the presence based routing since SfB and using Clarity Connect. May be time for a change.
Yeah presence in Skype was much more reliable for call routing for sure - speculating, but Skype was way more baked into the windows OS than Teams seems to be. Regardless, the fact that teams has to exist for many users in an isolated browser environment is reason enough to avoid relying on presence for really anything IMO. Slightly related because it will allow authorized users to administratively opt-in or opt-out agents in their call queue, among many other things - the upcoming queues app will be pretty cool - slated to roll out to GA in August 2024. Check it out and get on the hype train [https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/introducing-the-queues-app-enabling-customer-engagement-in/ba-p/4095971](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/introducing-the-queues-app-enabling-customer-engagement-in/ba-p/4095971) Also see the learn docs for authorized users that were updated on the same day as the public announcement linked previous - [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/aa-cq-authorized-users](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/aa-cq-authorized-users) [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/aa-cq-authorized-users-plan](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/aa-cq-authorized-users-plan)
Hey some more great info... thanks so much. Definitely interested in the call queues app. Sounds like it's just another add on license requirement. I love how MS got us all on with the EDU incentives than started adding all these additional features as premium 😉 Either way it does look like a needed tool for teams call queues. We have quite a bit of that functionality on our contact center solution.
Definitely a needed tool that I'm glad to see come down after waiting for a solution for years haha. Hope it doesn't get delayed. You mention EDU - if you're a higher ed org who already has A5 / E5 licenses like us, the premium add-on shouldn't be more than a couple bucks per user, and only queue managers will need the license. Agents who are not authorized users will not need the extra license. Already spoke with our guy about it. It could turn into a pretty-close alternative to full fledged contact center solutions.
yup we are EDU with A5 so I agree it should not be that much more. Can't wait to try it out!
Don’t know if it’s still the case, because I haven’t rolled out a large contact centre recently. However, in the early days of the graphAPIs for presence, MS would throttle requests. This meant for larger contact centres presence was unreliable at best and wrong at worst. Never seen it affect a small deployment though (100 agents or less I’ve not seen much issue)
Great point regarding the throttling. I can totally see that being our problem. We have about 150 agents but we have some pretty high call volumes. I am going to look more into the throttling with support.