All communications will move to the cloud in the future. This statement has been in almost all business news, magazines, and interviews in the past few months. But if you look around, it’s easy to see that the future is already here. Integrated telephony solutions are already being used by some businesses in India.
Cloud communications are already here and helping organizations in various fields, from the IVR that greets you when you call Domino’s to the broadcast calls from your local politicians.
Even though cloud services are important to the growth of the world, Indian businesses have quickly realized the benefits of cloud telephony. They know that to help their clients through the ongoing digital revolution, they need a plan to stay flexible and proactive.
Cloud telephony, the communication platform of the future, is the best choice for any business that puts customer communication first.
What is Cloud Telephony, and What is its Potential?
Communication is the most important part of any business. Companies that don’t connect with their clients or give their employees a clear way to work together will fall behind in the race. So, strong communication systems are one of the first things businesses put money into.
Integrated telephony solutions for cloud calling come into play at this point. come into play at this point. It has the potential to change the way businesses work.
Businesses can move all of their communication systems to the cloud thanks to the power of automation. It reduces their CAPEX by a lot and gives them tools that are efficient, useful, and necessary to provide them with a competitive edge.
Cloud telephony solutions can help businesses grow in the following ways:
- Easy and cheap to scale up
- 99.99% uptime
- Save a lot of money.
- Allows for effective marketing campaigns and analysis of those campaigns
- Provides international and toll-free phone numbers
- enables effective work from afar
- Call analytics to improve the efficiency of a business.
- Instant and safe backup and storage of data
Cloud telephony solutions benefits help sales and customer service teams in many ways. Customer-facing teams can have better conversion rates if they offer missed call services, analytical reports, and scheduled callbacks.
What is Different about Cloud Telephony, and What Makes it Better?
On-premise phone systems must have the whole infrastructure set up in one place. This gives you full control over the phone systems but also has some bad points. Since these are old-fashioned landline systems, they need a lot of upkeep and are affected by the weather. As a result, they can also be damaged for several different reasons.
Cloud telephony solutions are based in the cloud, so they don’t need any infrastructure or hardware other than the phones. Also, because they are hosted in the cloud, they aren’t easily damaged and don’t change much when the weather changes. Yes, it may make people feel like they have less control over the infrastructure, but it also takes away their responsibility for building and keeping up the infrastructure.
In this way, the amount of time, money, and people saved is big enough to make up for what some might think of as less control. In reality, you get even more control than with an on-premise system.
The latter is much more scalable than traditional and cloud-based phone systems. A company can meet changing customer needs with just a phone call. They can change how much they use it whenever they want, so they only pay for what they use. On the other hand, a traditional system can only be made bigger (at the intensive cost of expensive investment in hardware and manpower).
Growth of Integrated Telephony Solution for Cloud Telephony
With the cloud in place, there was a new way to send voice and multimedia. Let’s see what happens on 2G and 3G networks to help us understand this better.
When a phone call is made, a link is made between the person making the call and the person receiving it. This link has a certain amount of bandwidth, and the call goes through it. The link will be there as long as the call goes through. This method, called the “Circuit Switching Method,” is easy to use and works well.
The idea of sending voice and other media over the internet was born when the cloud came along. This led to the development of Voice over Internet Protocol, or IP technology (VoIP). With VoIP, no bandwidth needs to be set aside for any call. Instead, the data is split into smaller pieces called “packets.” Since each packet is sent separately, the bandwidth can be shared by more than one user.
But it’s easier to say than to do. Because different people send different packets over the same line, there is a chance that some packets will arrive late or not at all. This is a big problem for voice-based communication because parts of words, whole words, or even whole sentences can get lost, making any conversation meaningless.
As technology has improved, many changes have been made to the packet-switched network, making it more reliable than ever.
Price and Quality- Balancing Both
Businesses using VoIP could make calls using only their broadband networks. This made doing business easy and cheap. An organization could work in multiple locations without setting up an on-premise system.
However, the lack of reliability was still too much for many organizations to accept VoIP, so the choice between VoIP and traditional systems became between cost and quality.
This was solved when 4G LTE came out. Long-term evolution, which LTE stands for, has made the internet much faster. 4G LTE is at least ten times faster than 3G. Voice calls over 4G LTE use the following two technologies:
CSFB (Circuit-Switched Fall Back): This simple solution sends data over the LTE network while voice calls are made over a 3G or 2G network.
VoLTE (Voice over LTE): Like VoIP, VoLTE uses packet switching to make voice calls, but the network provider invests a lot in the underlying network infrastructure to avoid latency problems. Also, the latency reduction is much better because LTE is at least ten times faster than 3G.
Not only did VoLTE end the big debate, but it also paved the way for the rise of UC&C, which stands for Unified Communications and Collaborations. It brings together different business communication tools. An organization’s e-mails, voicemails, voice communications, web, messaging, real-time communications, and conferences, as well as their schedules and due dates, can be put into a single system that can handle them all.
Cloud telephony solutions are appealing to small businesses because of the following:
Scalability
“The need for scalability is the most important reason to look at new VoIP systems,” says Software Advice’s buyer report. When buying new technologies, one of the hardest things for small businesses to figure out is whether or not they can grow with their needs.
After talking to many of our own customers, we know that cloud telephony benefits small businesses, especially in terms of scalability. Before, many businesses used hard phones, but when they started opening up in different places and growing quickly, their phone system couldn’t keep up. They realized that on-site phone systems weren’t going to work.
In this case, cloud telephony can be a huge help. A cloud phone system only needs one click to add a user. Adding a new extension or giving your agents more licenses is as easy as calling a number on your cell phone. There is no need to make changes to the infrastructure that would cost a lot of money and take a lot of time, both of which are valuable resources that small businesses can’t afford to lose.
Integration with tools for doing business
Using different tools can hurt both your customer service and your sales processes. Imagine a salesperson talking to a prospect. They might need to take notes, set up a follow-up, and track all their prospects. In the same way, a support agent would have to check in with customers more than once to ensure a problem has been fixed.
Hard phones slow down the process because an agent or rep can’t link a call to a prospect, there’s no way to keep track of a prospect’s questions, and things can quickly get out of hand. This will hurt their work and, more importantly, their morale.
Integrated telephony solution helps users to connect their phone system to their CRM or help desk easily. This makes it easy to connect each call to a specific customer. They wouldn’t have to switch between tools, and all their information would be in one place.
A business can benefit a lot from a smooth workflow. One of our customers was growing quickly and missed many calls. Since switching to a cloud phone system, they say, “they brought much-needed order to their chaotic workflow” and were able to cut the number of calls they missed by up to 35%.
Reporting and Analysis
Today, data is the most important thing. To analyze and make business decisions, it’s important to have data that is easy to get to. A study by Deloitte found that 72% of companies think they can improve the customer experience by using analytics.
Most on-premise phone systems don’t have analytics, so you can’t find out how well your teams are doing or how happy your customers are. This can make all the difference for a small business. Businesses that take a proactive approach, set goals, and closely track their progress tend to do better than those that don’t. Small businesses can’t take the risk of not knowing what’s going on.
With tools like call recording, a small business phone system gives them the information they need to determine what they are doing right and where they are going wrong. With the help of useful analytics, small businesses can now measure their performance in numbers and give better customer service.
Mobility
When a customer has a question, they expect a quick answer. Not being at your desk is no reason to miss a customer call. When it comes to customer service, small businesses can do a lot better than bigger ones, which may find it hard to give personalized and quick service.
When a business has to use an on-premise system, it is tied to its desks (and in the past). With cloud telephony, small businesses can quickly help customers no matter where they are, as long as they have an internet connection. This gives small business owners much freedom because they can always stay in touch, even when not in the office.
This also makes it possible to work from home or work while traveling. CoSo Cloud did a study that found that 77% of employees are more productive when they work from home. This shows that remote work is on the rise and is here to stay.
Small businesses stand to gain the most from this, too. Space is often a big issue for new businesses, and hiring agents remotely saves them money on rent. It also allows them to hire agents temporarily if they need more bandwidth. Remote work is also good for the environment. A big company like Dell tried it and found that their U.S. employees avoid 2.7 billion round trips annually by telecommuting. This is the same as cutting 30 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide annually from their commuting footprint.
Cost Savings
Small businesses need to save money; there is no better way to do that than with a cloud phone system.
Experts say that VoIP can cut the costs of starting a new business by about 90%. Think about it: without cloud telephony, small businesses would have to buy hard phones and phone cables, set up servers, hire technical help, and rent a huge amount of space just for their phone system. On top of that, they would have to pay for ongoing maintenance and sign contracts that would keep them in this setting for at least three to five years.
Compared to their current system, a small business that switches to VoIP can expect to save 40% on local calls. This is because most cloud phone systems have cheaper call rates, and businesses can also buy local numbers in other countries and call at local rates with cloud phone systems.
Indian Businesses and Cloud Telephony
The way businesses talk to their customers has changed because of cloud communications. Also the fact that they are so common has also made people expect more from them. This quick change in how people interact and what they expect has made it possible for technology to spread to more areas of the Indian market.
Indian companies are quickly jumping on the VoIP bandwagon, but many other cloud telephony services have also been used successfully by many brands. Tech-based ride-hailing companies’ marketing campaigns like RedBus and Ola have often used voice and SMS broadcasting tools.
Food delivery giants like Swiggy and Zomato use tools to hide users’ phone numbers to protect their privacy. Also, companies like Airtel and Vodafone have seen a big improvement in their customers’ experiences since they switched their customer service to voice-based IVR services.
Cloud telephony can even help non-profits do their good work. With missed call services, organizations like Amnesty International have made it possible for many people to report social problems without giving their names. IVRs can also work with local languages, meaning a single tool could easily reach people in different parts of the country.
But India’s startup culture is the one that will gain the most from cloud telephony services. Cloud solutions have helped them grow quickly by giving them access to enterprise-level software at prices that are easy on their budget. Cloud telephony services are also very scalable, which makes it easy for startups like Rapido to move into new markets.
The Indian government is also doing a lot to take advantage of the opportunities opening up as technology changes. Niti Aayog and AWS opened the Frontier Technologies Cloud Innovation Centre. This shows that they are interested in cloud communications.
Wrapping It Up
Effective communication, both inside and outside the organization, is the key to its success. Cloud telephony and the services that go with it are quickly taking over the Indian market, with the promise that they will change this basic building block.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic made working from home the “new normal,” businesses will continue to use cloud telephony services to run their businesses in the future. Technology has completely changed how business is done in India, and it is becoming an important part of the operational strategies and growth stories of businesses in all fields. If you are looking for a reliable cloud telephony solution provider, then Office24by7 can be your go-to option.
