Customer support in Microsoft Teams: let business customers write to you where they already work

Monday, 8:40. A client's office manager asks your account manager in Teams to fix a scanner and set up a mailbox by Wednesday. Your account manager is on holiday, nobody else sees the chat, and on Wednesday the client calls, annoyed.

This guide compares the 3 ways clients can reach you in Teams and shows how to keep every request in front of your whole team, with or without new software.

Why your clients ask for help in Teams

If you run an IT service company, an agency, a software business, a wholesaler or an accounting firm, you probably know some version of that Monday. Your clients' staff spend the workday in Microsoft Teams, so that is where they ask for help.

On its October 2023 earnings call, Microsoft put Teams at "more than 320 million monthly active users" (Microsoft FY24 Q1 earnings call). Your support process probably still assumes that requests arrive by email or phone.

3 ways another company can reach you in Teams

Microsoft gives you 3 routes for people outside your organization. They look similar from a distance and behave very differently once you try to run support through them.

External access: a chat between 2 organizations

External access lets your people "find, call, chat, and set up meetings with people outside your organization who use Teams", and Microsoft switches it on by default (Microsoft Learn: guest access and external access).

Your client types your account manager's email address and starts chatting. Nobody has to invite anyone.

For support it is the weakest route, because the chat belongs to 2 people. Microsoft's comparison table on the same page lists what doesn't work across external access:

• You can't share files with external access users.
• They can't access your teams and channels.
• Out of office messages don't show.

That last one matters more than it sounds. Your away notice in Teams doesn't reach a client who writes this way.

Guest access: your client joins one of your teams

With guest access you invite people from a client into a team of yours. They get a guest account in your Microsoft Entra directory and can chat, post in channels and work on files with you.

The friction sits on their side. Microsoft writes: "If they normally use Teams with another Microsoft 365 organization, they need to switch organizations in Teams to interact with your organization" (Microsoft Learn: guest access and external access).

After a guest is added to a team, Microsoft also notes that it "may take a few hours" before they have access (Microsoft Learn: guest experience in Teams).

A busy office manager who has to switch organizations to report a broken scanner will often skip that step and message the one person they know instead. Then you are back to the first route.

Shared channels: one channel both companies see

A shared channel shows up inside your client's own Teams, next to their other channels, so nobody switches anything. The setup is the hard part.

Shared channels with other companies run on Microsoft Entra B2B direct connect, which Microsoft blocks by default. It "is possible only when both organizations allow access to and from the other organization" (Microsoft Learn: B2B direct connect overview).

So your admin and your client's admin both have to change settings. And guests "can't be added to a shared channel" (Microsoft Learn: shared channels), so you can't mix the two routes in one channel.

The 3 routes side by side

Where support over Teams breaks down

Whichever route you pick, Teams was built for colleagues working together. A support request needs 4 things that Teams doesn't track.

Nobody owns the request

Requests land with whoever the client happens to know. If that person is ill, in a workshop or gone for the week, the request waits, and nobody else knows it exists.

Nobody can see what is still open

Teams has no "open", "waiting on the client" or "solved". A channel post that got a thumbs up looks exactly like one that got fixed.

Ask your team on a Friday how many client requests are still open, and the honest answer is a lot of scrolling.

Each client's history sits in 3 places

Part of the story is in emails to your help desk, part in Teams chats, part in someone's notes from a phone call. When the client says "we reported this in March", you search 3 places and still aren't sure you found everything.

Requests drown in chatter

In a lively client channel, "the VPN drops every afternoon" sits between a lunch photo and 4 replies saying thanks.

How to run client support in Teams with what Microsoft gives you

You can fix a lot of this before buying anything.

1. Pick one route per client and write it down. Clients with their own Microsoft 365 and an IT team willing to allow B2B direct connect get a shared channel. Small clients without IT are often better off with guest access or plain email.
2. Keep requests in a standard channel. Microsoft says bots "can't post messages or Adaptive Cards in private channel conversations" (Microsoft Learn: channel and group conversations). If you ever want an app to help with support, a private channel locks it out.
3. One request, one post. Ask clients to start a new post for each new issue and to answer inside its thread. Each request then keeps its own history, and you can see at a glance which threads are still going.
4. Give every day an owner. A simple rota ("Monday and Tuesday: Priya watches the client channels") fixes the holiday problem and costs nothing.
5. Say what doesn't belong in Teams. An outage that stops the client's business goes by phone. Teams is for everything that can wait an hour.
6. Copy each request into your help desk. It is tedious, and it is the only way to count requests, see who has them and know how long they waited.

Step 6 is the one that falls apart. Copying works for 3 clients. With 30, chats slip through on exactly the days you are busiest.

If you look at tools that do the copying for you, ask how they match a Teams person to a contact you already have. Microsoft's own developer docs say the email value it hands to apps "isn't guaranteed to be correct" (Microsoft Learn: ID token claims).

Teams, email or both?

Teams doesn't have to replace anything. Offer it to clients whose people already work in Teams all day and who will join one of your teams as guests or set up a shared channel with you.

Keep email for everyone else. If you want both to land in one list for your team, the unified inbox guide covers how to run that list.

A 2 week test before you decide

Pick the client who messages you most in Teams today. For 2 weeks, count how many of their requests reached your team only through someone's personal chat.

If that number makes you uneasy, move that client into a channel first and leave the rest as they are.

Letting Deskwoot do step 6

Deskwoot is the help desk we build. Its Microsoft Teams inbox turns each private chat with the Deskwoot app, and each channel thread where the app was added, into a conversation next to your email, live chat and WhatsApp. Each person who writes becomes a contact.

You assign the conversation to a teammate and answer from Deskwoot. The reply lands in the same Teams chat or thread with that teammate's name in front, and by default a short note tells the client when you resolve or reopen it.

The office manager from Monday posts in your shared channel and gets her answer there, without ever opening Deskwoot.

What it takes

A Global or Teams Administrator of your organization signs in with Microsoft once. Your Microsoft 365 admin uploads the app file once and decides with app policies who may use it (Microsoft Learn: custom app policies).

The app then shows up in Teams right away, and the Microsoft Teams setup guide has each step.

Private channels, group chats and chats over external access stay outside the inbox. Files attached to a channel post don't arrive, only the text does.

Fynn in Teams

Fynn, Deskwoot's AI agent, can answer first from your own content, from the Startup plan on. In a channel thread it gives general answers only and hands questions about orders, payments or accounts to your team.

Try it on one client

Teams works on every plan, the free Hacker plan included. Start with the client from your 2 week count: sign up, add a Microsoft Teams inbox under Settings > Inboxes and move that client into a channel with the app.

A new workspace gets 7 days of Enterprise, Fynn included, without a card and for up to 30 seats, yours included.