CentrePal becomes first to achieve Microsoft Unify certification: a new era for CX

When we started CentrePal, our mission was simple: empower contact centres with the tools that make agents more productive, customers happier, and operations smoother - all within the Microsoft Teams environment our clients already use and trust.

Today, I'm proud to share a major milestone in that journey, as we announce that CentrePal is the first independent software vendor (ISV) globally to achieve Microsoft's new Unify certification, powered by the Teams Phone Extensibility (TPE) framework. It's a breakthrough that sets a new benchmark for what's possible in a Microsoft-native contact centre - and opens the door to the future of AI-powered customer experience.

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Why this matters now

Contact centre leaders face mounting pressure to deliver exceptional experiences while managing operational complexity. Agent burnout, poor self-service implementations that create more problems than they solve, and disconnected systems that fragment customer context—meanwhile, IT is stuck maintaining legacy infrastructure that was never built for the kind of scale or speed expected of today. These challenges demand integrated solutions, not additional tools.

That’s the gap Unify closes.

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What makes Unify different?

Instead of connecting your contact centre to Teams, what if your contact centre ran on the same infrastructure as Teams? That's what Unify enables. By leveraging Azure Communication Services with direct access to Teams Phone infrastructure, we can build contact centre capabilities that aren't just integrated with Teams—they're part of Teams. Same calling infrastructure, same data layer, same security model.

Consider what this actually unlocks:

Agent workflows that make sense: When a customer calls, agents don't switch apps. The call appears in Teams with full customer context, AI-powered suggestions surface naturally in their workflow, and supervisors can monitor and assist without disrupting the agent experience.

Intelligence at the infrastructure level: Real-time sentiment analysis, conversation summaries, and predictive routing happen at the platform level, not as bolt-on features. This means lower latency, better accuracy, and seamless integration with your existing Teams policies and controls.

Operational simplicity: Your IT team manages one communication platform, not two. Emergency calling, compliance recording, and security policies apply consistently across internal and customer communications.

Unify brings together many aspects of the contact centre, in a way that just makes sense - especially for organisations that have already standardised onto Microsoft 365 and Teams Calling.

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Why CentrePal is leading the way

What excites me most about achieving Unify certification isn't just the technology - it's how seamlessly it builds on the foundation we've already established. CentrePal was originally built using Microsoft's Extend framework, giving us years of experience delivering Teams-native contact centre solutions to enterprise customers worldwide.

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What this means for our customers

The immediate benefit is continuity. If you're using CentrePal today, you'll continue getting the robust, enterprise-grade platform you rely on. But you'll also start to see new capabilities become available over the coming months that simply weren't possible before.

Our initial feature set that scheduled for release next month for customer preview will include:

Intent-Based Routing: Automatically directs callers to the most relevant queue, or agent or self-service flow by understanding their spoken intent, ensuring faster and more accurate service.

Caller Insights for Supervisors: Real-time visibility into active calls, including transcript of the live conversation so far, overall sentiment, customer intent, and conversation summaries - empowering supervisors to intervene at critical moments.

AI-Generated Summaries for Agents: Automated conversation summaries at the end of each interaction, significantly reducing time spent on manual wrap-up note-taking.

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The bigger transformation ahead

Unify signals something significant about the future of business communications. The traditional boundaries between internal collaboration tools and customer-facing systems are dissolving, replaced by integrated platforms that treat all communication as part of a unified experience.

This shift creates enormous opportunities for organisations that are ready to embrace it. Contact centres that operate on modern infrastructure will be able to leverage advances in AI, automation, and analytics in ways that legacy systems simply cannot support. The competitive advantage will increasingly belong to companies that can adapt quickly to new capabilities rather than those locked into rigid, proprietary architectures.

For Microsoft-centric organisations, this transformation offers a particular advantage: the ability to extend existing investments rather than replacing them. Your Teams expertise, your Azure infrastructure, your security policies, your compliance frameworks—all of these become assets that enhance your customer service capabilities rather than constraints that limit them.

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Join the preview program

This is just the beginning. With Unify certification in hand, we’re rolling out our feature preview program to give our customers and partners early access to these new Voice AI capabilities with Unify, expected in H2 2025. If you’re a customer or partner ready to see how AI-native contact centres can transform your operations, you can register your interest here.