This is one of the most common questions we hear.
If your business already runs on Microsoft Teams, using it for voice feels like the logical next step. One platform, one login, fewer systems to manage.
And for some organisations, Teams Voice does the job just fine.
Where we see problems is when Teams is asked to replace a phone system that supports customer facing calls, contact centre workloads, or business critical voice traffic.
That is where the difference between collaboration and communications starts to matter.
Voice architecture still matters
Dedicated UCaaS platforms like 8x8 are built around voice as their primary function.
Their networks are designed for carrier grade reliability, prioritising voice traffic, managing call quality, and handling failures without taking everything else down. Voice is not an add on, it is the core service.
Microsoft Teams sits inside a much wider ecosystem. When Microsoft has an authentication issue, a tenant problem, or a platform outage, voice is affected along with chat, meetings, and files.
With a dedicated UCaaS platform such as 8x8, voice is decoupled from your collaboration tools. If Teams has a bad day, your phones still ring. For many organisations, that separation is not technical preference, it is risk management.
External calling is where issues usually appear
Teams works well for internal collaboration. The friction tends to appear once calls leave your organisation.
Customers, parents, patients, suppliers, partners. These calls travel over unpredictable networks and varying bandwidth. Voice platforms designed for this reality handle it better because they are optimised for it.
We regularly see Teams deployments where internal calls are fine, but external calls suffer from dropped audio, jitter, or inconsistent quality. When your teams spend their day speaking to people outside the business, that reliability becomes part of your brand.
Platforms such as 8x8, Zoom Phone, and other dedicated UCaaS providers are designed with this external calling model in mind, rather than relying purely on the end user environment.
Features are included, not bolted on
Microsoft has invested heavily in Teams Voice, but many advanced calling features still require additional licences or third party services.
Things like call recording, analytics, advanced call routing, contact centre capability, and reporting are often standard within platforms like 8x8. In the Microsoft ecosystem, they tend to arrive via premium add ons or separate integrations.
What looks cheaper at the start can become complex once you try to match the functionality your business actually uses day to day.
8x8 also allows businesses to run unified communications and contact centre from the same platform. That means organisations can start simple and add capability without changing systems later.
Teams and 8x8 are not an either or choice
This is the bit that often gets missed.
Many of our customers use Teams every day for chat, meetings, and collaboration, while running voice through 8x8. Users keep the Teams interface they like, but calls are handled by a platform designed specifically for voice.
It is not about rejecting Microsoft. It is about letting each platform do what it does best.
Simplifying the stack still requires judgement
We are all in favour of reducing complexity. Fewer systems can mean fewer problems.
But voice is still one of the most business critical services most organisations run. It deserves to be treated differently to chat and file sharing.
Sometimes the option that feels free upfront is the one that costs the most in reliability, support time, and lost confidence later.
If you’d like to discuss solutions, please call us on 0344 264 5522 or please email us.
