Today, Microsoft-centric organizations often find themselves grappling with a paradox. On one hand, they want to harness the scale, AI, and integration prowess of Microsoft’s own Dynamics 365 Contact Center. On the other, they crave the simplicity, agility, and cost predictability of a certified Teams-native contact center.
The stakes are high. Choose wrong, and you risk spiralling costs, brittle operations, and poor continuity. These challenges are more pressing than ever, given the rise of AI-driven customer expectations, tighter cloud budgets, and the reality of outages. IT and CX leaders need clear, actionable guidance.
Scalability Showdown: Strengths and Trade-offs
Dynamics 365 Contact Center’s biggest strength lies in its scale and depth. As Gidi Adlersberg, VP of Voca CIC at AudioCodes observed, for very large operations, “more than 2,000 agents,” it becomes an appealing Microsoft-native play.
Dynamics offers a single-vendor approach, aligning with enterprises that are heavily invested in the Azure, Teams, and Office 365 ecosystems. Leaders gain seamless access to Microsoft’s AI innovations, such as Copilot, and benefit from a unified data layer with the CRM.
Yet that power comes at a cost. Adlersberg warned of its “modular solution,” which demands more integrations, screen switching (between bots, Power BI, Copilot), and orchestration. “If you have a complex, high-capacity operation, that might justify that. But maybe that’s too much overhead for you.” For organizations with fewer than 2,000 seats, Dynamics might be an overkill, both operationally and commercially.
By contrast, certified Teams-native contact center solutions such as AudioCodes’ Voca CIC are built for innovation with simplicity. As Adlersberg put it: “Rather than being modular, Voca CIC is designed in a very out-of-the-box approach. There’s no screen switching. Everything comes from one screen, one platform, including AI, omnichannel and CRM.”
The tight integration with Teams, Azure-native design, and usage-based pricing make it lean and cost-predictable, especially appealing for enterprises with less than 2,000 agents.
Commercial and Operational Realities: Where Complexity Bites
When organizations choose Dynamics, they often start the deployment phase only to discover that third-party implementation partners will always be required. According to Adlersberg, “you’ll always have a third-party delivery partner, for good and for bad.” That division of accountability, between vendor and integrator, can slow down delivery and complicate support.
With Voca CIC, AudioCodes offers a different model of software and delivery under one roof. “We are the software vendor, but it’s also our own global professional services arm; the implementation, integrations, and ongoing support all comes from one single, accountable managed services provider – AudioCodes,” added Adlersberg. This single accountability tightens the feedback loop, giving CX leaders a more direct line to resolution, ensuring implementation and day two operations are done by the software vendor itself.
Furthermore, cost predictability is one of the more underestimated risks with Dynamics. Adlersberg cautioned: “You have the base named agent seat price, but then you have open-ended costs; AI services, voice, and data usage. Many elements are pay-as-you-go. It’s very hard to predict, and open-ended costs are a huge risk for IT leaders these days.”
This can catch organizations off guard when their Microsoft Enterprise Agreement renews. Suddenly, the bill is far larger than anticipated. A certified Teams-native, usage-based model helps tame that uncertainty. With Voca CIC, enterprises have complete budget predictability.
Architectural Risk & Resilience: How to Future-Proof Wisely
A major risk in selecting the “wrong” architecture lies not just in cost, but in resilience. As Adlersberg highlighted, Dynamics is “purely cloud-based.” In an era when cloud outages still happen relatively frequently, that dependence can be a vulnerability.
He advocated for a hybrid strategy: “Can you think of a hybrid strategy where you have an on-premises backup, for when that cloud contact center goes down?” With Voca CIC, AudioCodes offers a Survivable contact center add-on that provides on-premises backup for the cloud contact center, ensuring business and brand continuity even when Azure, or even internet is disrupted.
Additionally, there’s the risk of chasing innovation at the expense of the fundamentals. Adlersberg pointed out that building a basic IVR in Dynamics could be more challenging than developing a conversational AI bot. “You might overlook fundamentals, being overdrawn to shiny and innovative characteristics and unconsciously forgetting fundamental bread-and-butter things you need in day-to-day life.”
This leads to a broader strategic point. While Dynamics offers Gen AI and deep integration, organizations need to weigh whether those benefits justify the complexity, or whether a streamlined, resilient, and predictable Teams-native system better serves their customers today.
Hybrid and Interoperable Models: The Best of Both Worlds?
Leading enterprises are increasingly architecting for interoperability. Rather than choosing one framework outright, they adopt hybrid strategies. These combine premium contact centers for high-volume, mission-critical agents with other certified Teams-based contact centers for more agile or distributed teams, including internal service lines, departmental desks, satellite call queues, and frontline workers.
Adlersberg underscored this hybrid mindset, especially for “employees beyond the contact center,” including HR, IT helpdesks, and sales; people who are already on Teams but lack enterprise-grade CX tools. You should always assume it’s not only your classic agents that are going to need that.
AudioCodes supports this with Voca CIC, which empowers every Teams user, whether a formal agent or internal stakeholder, with contact center capabilities such as intelligent routing, self-service, AI voice agents, AI summary and real-time analytics. This layered approach delivers both scale and resilience, while avoiding vendor silos.
A Rule of Thumb For Microsoft-Centric Teams To Win
For Microsoft-centric buyers navigating this dilemma, Adlersberg offered a straightforward heuristic: “Do I need to serve more than 1,500 to 2,000 agents? Do I need a more modular solution, or do I prefer something that works completely out of the box?” It’s ostensibly a choice between complexity and scale (Dynamics) or simplicity and predictability (certified Teams-native CX solutions, like Voca CIC).
If your operation is large, global, and deeply embedded in Dynamics and Azure, and if handling modular integrations and variable costs is not a barrier, Dynamics 365 Contact Center likely makes sense. However, for many organizations, especially those with fewer than 2,000 agents or those seeking to democratize CX across departments, a solution like Voca CIC may deliver more value, faster, with significantly lower risk.
If you’re a Microsoft-first organization and you’re contemplating your next-generation contact center architecture, AudioCodes can help. Voca CIC is a Microsoft-certified Unify, Azure-native Teams contact center designed for rapid deployment, predictable costs, and built-in resilience. Find out more here.
