Everything you need to know about Cloud Telephony!
Posted Date: 28.November.2018
Cloud telephony, moving your phones to Cloud, moving your business to Cloud! If you are wondering, what is this Cloud and moving everything to Cloud means specially your Businesses, rest assured you have reached the right Blog!
This blog will serve as a simple, easy guide about everything you need to know about Cloud Telephony, Cloud telephony providers, and the best solutions for your Businesses by switching to Cloud telephony.
What is Cloud Telephony?Cloud telephony is a technique used to deliver telephone applications on the cloud as a hosted solution. It is a messaging and voice service that does not require traditional business telephone systems such as PBX or EPBAX.
It is a mode by which enterprises and businesses could make or receive multiple voice calls and messages simultaneously, without investing on any additional capital infrastructure.
Services like IVR, Call recording, Bulk messaging, Call conferencing, Custom greetings, Business hours etc. are only some of the many features cloud telephony providers are offering now.
The smartest way for you to manage business calls at a global level without compromising on quality and cost is using the services provided by Cloud Telephony companies.
How is Cloud Telephony works: The difference between Cloud telephony and Traditional methods
Cloud telephony has been around for over half a decade, but the concept was not grasped to the extent what we see today. People were aware like call routing, IVR, call recording, analytics but not cloud telephony. It was considered as Cloud PBX (Private branch exchange) system mainly and did not think beyond the simple call center use case.
Cloud based services was seen as a solution to replace the typical EPABX box in the office.
The traditional EPABX (Electronic private automatic branch exchange) or PBX comes with a lot of hassles like:
Customer care features remain primitive
Downtime is more sometimes amounting to issues with data recovery
Large space required to host systems
Scalability restrictions
High price for less features
Cloud Telephony on the other hand provides:
Quick set-up
Easy to scale
More reliable compared to traditional methods
Avoid hassles and save cost by process automation(Pay-as-you model)
24/7 accessibility from anywhere, any time
Lower operational costs: No infrastructure issues thus saving major cost for start-ups
Flexible and can be easily integrated to other CRMs
Secure platform with built-in disaster recovery
Real-time data and detailed analytics
Adds business value: Professional set up with automated IVR flows that boosts company image
How does Cloud Telephony add business value?
Cost becomes an integral part of Business. With Cloud telephony many redundant costs can be reduced to a bare minimum.
Cloud-based telephony solutions are agile. They can adapt to ever-changing requirements of the business. It allows businesses to lower expenses by eliminating the need of multiple vendors and network connection providers. Cloud-based telephony providers implement new features and provide platform/system updates from time-to-time that is managed centrally. These updates make your cloud telephony system more seamless. The changes happen in real-time without disturbing your work day and effective immediately.
As seen earlier, with traditional PBX systems, the equipment must be installed and maintained by the enterprise. External voice lines or SIP trunks must be provided by businesses. But with the Cloud telephony solution, the applications and management of the whole system resides with the Cloud telephony service provider.
These Cloud telephony service providers allow elastic scale and provide good SLAs without the worry of licenses and regulations which traditional system bring with them.
Businesses achieve cost savings through cloud telephony by paying only for the services used. Pay-as-you model is beneficial for start-ups who always face a cash crunch.
Cloud telephony solutions also enable reducing staff, automating processes, eliminating costly voice lines, long-distance contracts that are typical of traditional PBX methods.
Five sure ways Cloud Telephony benefits your businessesRight system can actually make you money
Businesses who provide services to customers where they need to track billable hours, cloud telephony system can actually make the process more streamlines by providing real-time accurate data. This ensures you bill your customers correctly and don’t miss out on any billable hours.
Integration with tools A number of cloud telephony service providers across the globe provide you CRM integrations like Zendesk, salesforce, Magento, Google spreadsheets, Happyfox, Zoho etc. which makes it easier for your employees to be more productive in addressing queries of customers thus saving huge amount of money over a period of time and win customer loyalty towards your brand due to smooth user experience.
Competent team Training your agents/team to handle calls more efficiently can be done by using some of the features the Cloud telephony service providers give. Call recording features can be used to monitor and track agent performance thus improving the quality of your call centre. This amounts to better customer experience and allows brand building for your Business.
Call conferencing can be used as a tool to train your agents and be more productive. This feature allows to improve first call resolutions and prevent escalations and act as Live training tool for your agents to resolve queries faster and better.
Allows to focus on expansion plans
Cloud telephony systems are accessible from any part of the globe. It allows you to connect with your team even while working remotely. With its scale-at-will feature, Cloud telephony allows you to expand your customer service desk as your business expands with no extra infrastructure. This way you can be sure that you have a happy customer base and focus on expanding your business.
Real-time data, actionable insights, customer privacy
With Cloud telephony services, you can now get the exact volume of calls handled by your customer service desk thus enabling you to look good in front of your clients. It provides real-time data. These Cloud service providers update data almost every hour keeping you updated. Detailed analytics help you with the graphical analysis of performance of your call centre.
Cloud telephony definitely is a game changer in the years to come. It is probably the only New age communication platform that has managed to connect and serve businesses of any size and segment. It allows enterprises to manage business calls without compromising on quality. The multi-level IVR which comes as part of Cloud telephony gives you a better grip in handling your calls according to requirements.
If you want one such simple, easy-to-use Cloud telephony provider across the Globe, leverage Kaleyra’s Cloud-based platform for all your messaging, voice and banking requirements.
Kaleyra being one of the top Cloud telephony providers in India and across the globe caters to a wide variety of industries like Banking, Finance, E-commerce, Logistics, Travel and tourism, Healthcare, Retail, Education sector etc. With a strong network operator connection in 200+ countries across the globe, our voice platform powers over 600 Million voice calls per year and 3 billion messages are delivered every month through messaging platform.