How to designate a teams group as a priority contact

Hi @M.S, 

Good day, I hope you are doing well. 

Thank you for reaching out and raising this. I understand why you would want messages in a dedicated Crisis group chat to still notify you while your status is set to Do Not Disturb. 

Based on the current Teams design, priority access is configured for individual people, not for an entire group chat. In Teams guidance, Do Not Disturb is intended to silence notifications, while priority access is managed by selecting specific people who can still reach you. 

Because of that, Teams does not currently provide a built in option to mark a group chat itself as a priority contact so that every message in that chat bypasses Do Not Disturb, regardless of who sends it. 

At this time, the closest available option is to use a different status such as Busy when you still want notifications to come through more broadly. 

I understand how important this functionality is for your workflow, therefore, I recommend submitting feedback directly to Microsoft via the Feedback Portal to help prioritize this feature in future updates. 

Sharing your experience through this channel is the most impactful way to advocate for a change that would benefit you and other users.     

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Teams does not support treating a specific group chat as a “priority contact” that can break through Do Not Disturb independently of the individual participants.

Available options from the provided information are:

1. Use status and notification tuning
   • Set status to Busy instead of Do not disturb when needing to focus but still wanting to see more notifications. Busy reduces interruptions but does not fully block notifications.
   • Adjust notification settings under Settings and more > Settings > Notifications and activity to ensure chat notifications are shown in a way that is noticeable for important chats (for example, enabling banners or sounds for chats while in Busy).
2. Use individual priority contacts (with the limitation mentioned)
   • Priority contacts can be used so that messages from specific people break through Do Not Disturb, but this applies to all messages from those people, not only those in a particular group chat.
3. Use urgent/priority messages as a process workaround
   • Senders in the “Crisis” chat can mark messages as urgent using priority notifications. Urgent messages notify the recipient every two minutes for up to 20 minutes or until the message is read, increasing the chance they are noticed, even if the recipient is not actively watching Teams.
   • An admin can enable or disable the ability to send priority notifications via messaging policies; this capability is on by default for users assigned the policy.

Given the constraints, there is no configuration in the provided material that allows designating a single group chat as a special “priority source” that bypasses Do Not Disturb without also elevating all messages from its members. The practical workaround is to combine status/notification tuning with a clear team process to send urgent messages using priority notifications in that “Crisis” chat when attention is critical.

References:

• Best practices for notifications in Microsoft Teams
• Messaging policies for healthcare organizations