5 Things Every Organization Should Know About Its Teams Phone Environment

A 911 call from a branch office sends responders to the wrong address. A client calls a number nobody has answered in two years. A customer reporting fraud gets bounced between three departments.

None of these are technology failures. The phones work fine. They're configuration failures, and they're almost always invisible right up until the moment they matter.

I've been in enterprise communications for more than two decades, and at ZIRO we spend our days inside some of the largest phone environments there are, well over a million users and devices. That's a lot of moving parts, which means we've seen just about every way a phone environment can go wrong, from the quiet to the catastrophic. And honestly, the same handful of surprises shows up almost every time.

So here are the five things I wish every organization knew about its Microsoft Teams Phone environment, ideally before finding out the hard way.

1. Moving to Teams Phone doesn't get rid of your phone system. It just moves it.

Migrating to Microsoft Teams Phone retires the old hardware, but every user, number, policy and location still has to be configured and managed inside your Microsoft tenant.

A lot of old PBXs spend their last years on life support, kept alive by the one person who still remembers how they work. So when one finally gets wheeled out, there's real relief. One less thing to manage. Unfortunately, that's not quite how it works. Everything the PBX used to handle still exists. It's just living inside your Microsoft tenant now.

Every user still needs the right number, the right policy, the right calling license and the right emergency location, and all of it now lives alongside everything else in Microsoft 365. The hardware may be gone, but the responsibility came along for the ride, usually landing on an IT team that already has plenty to do.

2. You're probably paying for phone numbers nobody uses.

Many organizations pay for phone numbers that have no user or device attached, and those numbers usually go unnoticed until someone audits the environment.

Every organization has a few forgotten numbers lying around. The surprise is how many. When we scanned Reed Smith's environment, we found 7,569 phone numbers, and 1,401 of them (nearly one in five) didn't have a single device attached.

That's real money going toward numbers with nobody on the other end. And to be clear, nobody did anything wrong here. Numbers get assigned, people move on, offices close, and there's rarely a reason for anyone to go back and check.

3. Most of your users probably don't need the license you bought them.

Microsoft Teams Shared Calling lets users who rarely make external calls share a phone number and calling plan, which means many organizations are paying for individual calling plans they don't need.

This one tends to raise eyebrows. In that same Reed Smith environment, our platform found that 6,896 numbers, 91% of the total, could run on Microsoft Teams Shared Calling rather than individual calling plans.

In our experience, licensing gets decided once, during the migration, when everyone is understandably focused on just getting it done. Then it rarely gets looked at again. But who actually needs what isn't a guessing game. Your own data can answer it, if you ask.

4. Your Teams Phone emergency calling is probably misconfigured, and nobody's checking.

Teams Phone emergency calling only works if each user's call routing and location settings are correct, and those settings often drift out of date without anyone noticing.

If I could get organizations to pay attention to just one of these, it would be this one. When someone dials 911, the call has to route to the right place and carry the right location. Both depend on configuration, and configuration drifts over time, usually without anyone noticing.

At Merck, we identified 1,225 open emergency calling misconfigurations. At AEP, it was 3,724. (One user can have more than one issue, so those are counts of problems rather than people.) Each one is a call that might not get where it needs to go, and the exposure isn't just operational: penalties can reach $10,000, plus $500 for every day a problem goes unfixed.

Now here's the part I find most telling. At Coface, the number was three. At Harman, it was zero. When you actually measure, you get to report the good news too. Not every environment is a mess. The trouble is you can't know which kind you have until you look.

5. None of this stays fixed.

A Teams Phone environment changes with every hire, move and departure, so keeping it accurate takes ongoing automation and management, not a one-time migration.

This is the one I think people underestimate most. A migration is a project with a start and an end date. A phone environment never really has an end date. Every new hire, every move, every departure and every new office changes the configuration a little, so you can get everything right on Monday and be drifting again by Friday.

That's why the cleanup matters less than what comes after it. Keeping a phone environment accurate takes automation and someone who stays responsible for it. Without that, even a perfect migration slowly unravels.

So why doesn't anyone look?

Honestly, because looking has always been expensive. Finding out what's really going on inside a phone environment used to mean weeks of work, a statement of work, and a professional services bill. So most organizations wait until something breaks, which is about the worst possible time to find out.

It doesn't have to work that way anymore. Our platform can audit a phone environment in five minutes or less, and that's our slowest run, not our best one.

Most of these problems aren't hard to fix. They're just hard to see, and they tend to stay invisible until a bill, an audit or an emergency call makes them obvious. The organizations that do best are the ones that decide to look before any of those happen.

Frequently asked questions

What should organizations check in their Teams Phone environment?

Start with four things: phone numbers with no user or device attached, whether each user is on the right calling license, whether emergency calling routes and locations are configured correctly, and how the environment stays accurate as people join, move and leave.

What is Microsoft Teams Shared Calling?

Shared Calling lets a group of Teams Phone users share a single phone number and calling plan instead of each user needing a dedicated number. Outbound calls show the shared number, and inbound calls reach users through an auto attendant. It's designed for users who don't make many external calls.

How long does a Teams Phone audit take?

Traditional discovery can take weeks and usually requires a paid professional services engagement. ZIRO's platform can audit a phone environment in five minutes or less.

Isn't a Teams Phone migration a one-time project?

The migration is. The environment isn't. Every hire, move and departure changes the configuration, which is why ongoing management and automation matter more than a one-time cleanup.