The Teams Voice services opportunity is already sitting inside your existing customer base. Many Microsoft partners just haven’t unlocked it yet.
Teams Voice, commonly referred to as Teams Phone, has surpassed 26 million PSTN users, up 30% in under two years (UC Today, Dec 2025). But the commercial case becomes sharper when you look at the full picture: there are 91 million commercial Teams Phone seats available globally, with around 80% still voice-inactive (Cavell Group, 2025). That means four in five seats have never been activated for calling. Partners who attach voice and services to their Microsoft customers earn three times the revenue per customer compared to those who stop at the licence. The demand is there. The growth is there. What is missing, for most partners, is the confidence and capability to deliver.
That is the gap this blog addresses. We look at where the Teams Voice market is heading, why complexity rather than appetite is the real barrier to adoption, and how Microsoft partners can build a services practice around Teams Voice that generates recurring revenue without hiring specialist engineers or restructuring their sales model.
What is Teams Voice, and why do your customers need it?
Your customers are already in Teams every day. Meetings, chat, file sharing, it is where work happens. But out of the box, Teams cannot make or receive calls to the outside world. No mobiles, no landlines, no external numbers. For most businesses, that is not optional.
Teams Voice fixes that. It connects Microsoft Teams to the public telephone network, turning a collaboration tool into a fully functional business phone system, on any device, without a separate PBX or parallel phone system running alongside it.
For businesses already paying for Microsoft 365, the case is compelling. One platform for every form of communication. Simpler IT, lower costs, and no hardware clutter. But the bigger prize is often missed: data is currency. When external call activity sits inside the Microsoft ecosystem alongside emails, meetings, and documents, businesses gain a complete picture of how their people communicate and how their customers behave, feeding directly into Copilot insights, Power BI dashboards, and reporting tools. That consolidated data layer is as valuable as the phone system itself.
The catch is that getting there is not simple. The technical complexity involved is exactly why so many Teams customers haven’t made the move yet, and exactly why partners who can deliver it are in such a strong position.
It’s not a demand problem. It is a delivery problem.
Low penetration does not mean low appetite. The evidence points the other way.
Teams Phone has been adding around 300,000 new users per month over the prior 20 months (DSTNY, January 2026).
“From what we see across the channel, the challenge has never been customer demand for Teams Phone. Most organisations already understand the value of consolidating collaboration and telephony into a single platform. The real barrier is execution. Partners often hesitate because Direct Routing, SBC configuration, number migration, compliance requirements and ongoing support can feel outside their core Microsoft skillset. That creates a significant opportunity. The partners who can remove that complexity, either through their own expertise or through Konekt, are the ones successfully turning Microsoft 365 customers into long-term voice and managed services customers.”
— Sagar Gandi, Director of Sales Europe & Board Member, Konekt
That is a partner opportunity, not a barrier.
Why partners stall at the licence
If the opportunity is clear, why do many Microsoft partners still stop at seat resale?
Direct Routing can feel risky without SBC experience or certified voice engineers. Post-deployment support is uncertain: what happens when something goes wrong six months after go-live? And services have historically been difficult to price, position and attach to a licence deal without slowing the sale or complicating the conversation.
These concerns are legitimate. But they are not reasons to leave the revenue on the table.
What a Teams Voice services practice actually looks like
Building a services practice around Teams Voice does not mean hiring a specialist engineering team or reworking your sales approach. It means attaching the right capability to the opportunities you are already winning.
The lifecycle runs from initial discovery through to long-term managed support, with a natural entry point at every stage.
Starting with confidence, not risk. Before committing to a complex Teams Phone project, a focused discovery session changes the nature of the engagement. A Konekt solutions engineer maps the customer’s environment in detail and delivers a clear design and action plan before anything is touched. Partners who start here walk into projects knowing what they’re dealing with. Those who skip it find out the hard way.
Getting deals moving. When intent is confirmed but a customer is not ready for a full rollout, a structured proof-of-concept sprint moves things from planning into action. It proves the solution works in the customer’s environment before committing to a wider rollout, with the pilot built to production standard from day one, so nothing has to be rebuilt later.
The repeatable services add-on.
For standard Teams Phone deployments, a packaged service with a fixed price and defined scope is the simplest way to add meaningful services revenue to every licence deal. Easy to quote, easy to explain, and it makes the proposal stronger, not more complicated.
Solving the SBC problem. Direct Routing complexity and SBC configuration are where deals stall and reputations get dented. Konektor removes this barrier entirely; partners can connect SIP services to Teams without building or owning any SBC infrastructure, and without needing Operator Connect certification. The complexity stays with Konekt; the partner stays front of house.
Flexible engineering capacity. When the team is stretched or an unexpected project lands, specialist engineering capacity is available on demand. No fixed scope, no headcount, commitment, just the right resource, when it’s needed.
Post-deployment stickiness. Go-live is not the end of the services conversation, it is the start of the most valuable part. Specialist technical support keeps the partner front-of-house while Konekt’s technical engineers handle complex escalations. For partners whose support teams are stretched, managed support handles overflow and keeps the platform up and running.
It is also where the ecosystem attach becomes significant: compliance recording, contact centre integration and voice analytics are where margin and long-term stickiness are built, and where the recurring revenue conversation moves well beyond the initial deployment.
Konektor: the platform conversation
The services lifecycle above turns every Teams Phone opportunity into a delivered project with margin attached. But for partners who want to go further, there is a different kind of conversation to be had – one that moves from project delivery to ongoing managed proposition.
Konektor is Konekt’s cloud voice enablement platform, a single managed environment that brings together everything a partner needs to deliver enterprise-grade voice across Teams, Zoom and Webex, under their own brand.
For Microsoft partners, Konektor matters in two ways.
For partners who do not hold Direct Routing or Operator Connect certification, Konektor removes the biggest barrier to competing in the Teams telephony market outright. For those who are already deploying, it creates a recurring revenue layer that sits above and beyond project work: an ongoing managed service offered under the partner’s brand. Your margins, your customer relationship.
Start attaching services
The lifecycle described above is not theoretical. Konekt packages each stage as a ready-to-attach service, so the question for most partners is not whether they can afford to build a services practice. It is how quickly they choose to start.
If the stages and services above aren’t yet part of how you go to market, that’s exactly what partnering with Konekt is for.
Licences get you in the door. Services keep you there.
The next step
Konekt works with Microsoft partners to build the service capabilities behind their UC practice: so they can win and retain voice customers without building the technical depth in-house.
If you are selling Microsoft 365 and want to turn your existing customer base into a voice and managed services practice, speak to a Konekt specialist.
Find out moreSources
UC Today, “Microsoft Teams Phone PSTN Users Surges to 26 Million, up 30% in 20 Months”, Kristian McCann, 23 December 2025. https://www.uctoday.com/unified-communications/microsoft-teams-phone-pstn-users-surges-to-26-million-up-30-in-20-months/
DSTNY, “Behind the Big Numbers: Microsoft Teams Phone in 2026”, Joshua Moynehan, 12 January 2026. https://www.dstny.com/blog/behind-the-big-numbers-microsoft-teams-phone-in-2026
Pure IP, “Teams Phone Reaches 26 Million Users and Shows No Signs of Slowing”, Tania Morrill, January 2026. https://www.pure-ip.com/blog/teams-phone-reaches-26-million-users-and-shows-no-signs-of-slowing
Cavell Group, “Huge Growth to Come in Microsoft Teams Telephony Market”, June 2025. https://www.cavell.com/huge-growth-to-come-in-microsoft-teams-telephony-market/
