Microsoft Teams Voice – Call Queue Troubleshooting

Had a funky issue to work through the other day; I set up a basic call queue with 2 attendants in Microsoft Teams voice. For this queue I used “serial” routing so that it followed a specific order for the attendants. Oddly, the first person couldn’t answer the phone.

Well, they could, but the call would drop nearly immediately. You’d see the screen start to pop up, the circle of death circling, and boom call dropped. On the caller side it would either produce an error tone or busy signal (I think this is from the caller’s carrier, not Teams).

What’s odd is that the second attendant had no problem answering, perfectly reliable, yet they use practically the same laptop, same version of Teams, and just about same everything else. I troubleshooted a few things; made sure the Teams firewall settings were applied, verified connectivity and network was good, unplugged all headsets/handsets, etc. Normal Teams calls worked fine, and even voice calls to the user’s direct dial number worked perfectly.

Since it seems to be directly related to the call queue, I went through the queue settings to see if I missed something, and noticed an odd setting I’m sure I skipped over: Conference Mode.

I’m not sure what the default was, I believe I left it off or as default as it seemed to be an oddly worded setting and I wasn’t sure we needed it. It did have some instruction to set it to “Auto” for calls to connect better/faster, so…OK…let’s try it. I turned it on (auto), and that seemed to have resolved the problem with the attendant answering the phone, although they did encounter a couple “glitches” in that a couple times out of maybe 5-10, the call would say “Waiting for someone to join” and put up a “leaving” icon on the screen. Time will tell if that issue persists, as I just changed the conference mode setting only minutes before, and often Teams settings can take hours to really propagate.

It seems this setting is really a Skype compatibility setting; when it’s off, the instructions say turning it on connects faster (if caller and agent both support it?). I guess that means if a Teams caller is calling in, but really I would think call queues are mostly for voice callers. When it’s on, it basically said Skype agents won’t work properly. Definitely getting mixed signals here!

Anyhow, I did grab logs and will still likely test this further or possibly open a ticket, as it seems that user then had trouble with transfers, and will need to have calls transferred. If you’ve dealt with this problem and have any thoughts or info, please do me a favor and reply below!