How Cloud Telephony Will Help Your Small Business To Scale
Small and medium businesses usually work on a tight budget and
low-profit margins. Hence, they are always on a lookout to increase their
profits to create a sustainable business. SMEs find it challenging to increase
their revenue without burdening employees and lowering service quality.
For early-stage startups, it becomes more crucial to keep a close eye on their daily operational costs. It is a hard known fact that 90% of startups fail within their first year only due to their inability to manage day-to-day expenses efficiently.
For small businesses to increase their revenue, it is vital to provide excellent customer service and product support. However, in the earlier days of the IT revolution, companies used to buy and maintain expensive hardware components, including PBXs, switches, gateways, etc. to keep up their internal and external communication processes. In addition to this, the traditional communication set up also required regular maintenance costs.
What if small businesses could find a smart and economical way to keep
their IT costs down and offer top-notch service and product support. Cloud
telephony is precisely meant for this purpose. According to Forbes,
83% of enterprise workloads will be in the cloud by 2020.
With a cloud telephony solution, you don’t have to buy or maintain expensive hardware like PBX system, VoIP adapters, etc. All of this hardware is present at the cloud telephony provider site. You have to subscribe to a monthly rental plan to leverage cloud telephony. Thus, saving you vast sums of money that you can use in your marketing campaigns to scale your small business.
In this
article, we will see how cloud telephony will help your small business to
scale. Before starting the roadmap, let’s dig deeper into cloud telephony and
see what it is.
What is cloud telephony?
Cloud telephony is an application of cloud technology to deliver
scalable and affordable telephony solutions to businesses of all sizes.
The
traditional PBX system is hosted by the off-site cloud telephony company on the
cloud to offer premium features, including location-based routings, call
recordings, voicemail, etc.
Cloud telephony solutions are delivered either by PSTN or
Internet Protocol (IP).
VoIP is an internet protocol for transferring audio data. It
basically converts analog signals (voice) to digital signals to facilitate internet
or cloud calling.
Typically,
with a cloud telephony solution, you can migrate your old business phone system
to the cloud. Here you get a virtual business phone number (toll free number or
local number), which you can set up for internal and external communications of
your organization.
The flow of cloud telephony calls:
- Your customers dial your cloud telephony number.
- The call is forwarded to the PRI lines of the cloud telephony
server. - Cloud telephony server will handle the call request based on how
you have configured it, i.e., play IVR, forward call to a specific extension,
ring group, etc. - The cloud telephony server will then call the agents based on
how you have configured call routing. - Once the agent answers the call, the cloud telephony server
connects your customers with the agent. - While your agents are talking with the customers, you can also
configure the cloud telephony server to perform additional functions, including
record calls for future analysis, allow agents to work with the CRM via API
calls, etc.
How Cloud Telephony Will Help Your Small Business To Scale
1. Cost-Effective
Utilizing a cloud telephony solution for your small business is far more economical when compared to traditional on-premise PBX systems. Traditional on-premise PBX systems are expensive as they require expensive hardware for their operations.
As in cloud telephony, all the hardware is kept and maintained by the host company, and you save a significant amount of money.
Another bonus is that you don’t have to hire an IT team to continually manage your communication system, which saves additional monthly expenses.
2. Do your business on the move
With a cloud telephony solution, you can take your work on the move. Most cloud telephony solution providers offer easy to use web portals and mobile apps which allow your employees to receive business calls even when they are on vacation.
3. Increased
Productivity
With advanced features that cloud telephony offers, you can answer the user’s call as soon as they dial their business number. Features like Auto Attendant for office makes it possible. You can greet customers with a custom music or promotional message which gives enough time to agents to wrap up the current call and pick up the next.
Apart from
that, if you have a remote workforce, then cloud telephony brings all of them on
a single platform. With a cloud-based phone system, you can efficiently conduct
a meeting via call conference. As international calling rates are quite costly,
it saves the much-needed cash for other business operations.
4. Brand Building
With cloud
telephony, you can change the perception of your small business and project it
as a prominent organization by offering delightful customer experience. You can
navigate the user’s call to the right department or team by setting up a
multi-level IVR (Interactive Voice Response) to quickly solve their queries or
provide support.
As a result, users start trusting your business, and you
establish a brand authority by showing that customers are the top priority for
your business.
5. Integrations
Cloud telephony provides integration with other essential business applications, including CRMs, office suites, etc.
With these custom integrations, you can streamline work processes to accelerate sales and hence increase your revenue to scale your business.
Benefits of
custom integrations with your cloud telephony solution:
- Reach out to customers from the platform of your choice.
- Employees don’t require any additional training to use the apps.
- Better customers contact management.
- Call customers right from the CRM application with Click to Call feature.
- Better sales tracking.
6. Call Recordings and Analytics
With a cloud telephony solution for your small business, you can opt to record the calls of your users, which you can use to analyze customer behavior, agent performance, and much more. Listening to the recordings of your users will help you to understand customers’ pain points and formulate strategies to drive more conversions.
Along with call recordings, you also get all the analytics data, which includes the total number of calls, location of calls, number of missed and dropped calls, entire call duration, and other essential metrics.
7. Flexible Scalability
It doesn’t matter if your small business is starting with just a team of two members. With cloud telephony, you don’t have to pay for unused resources, i.e., the total number of call minutes, call recordings, etc. The pricing plans of most cloud communication provider companies are flexible, i.e., you pay for only what you use.
Let’s say your team grows after a few months, and you require more resources, i.e., extensions, monthly calling minutes, etc. You can quickly scale your cloud telephony solution by switching to a higher plan offered by your provider.
Best of all, adding an extension, doesn’t require any technical expertise. Most cloud telephony providers offer easy-to-use web portals with which you can easily add extensions and configure it as per your requirements.
Final
Thoughts
Adoption of cloud telephony by small businesses and startups is on the rise as it allows them to use premium communication features at a very nominal cost. Thus, saving them lots of money which they can spend on scaling their small businesses and startups.
Want to
experience the power of cloud telephony, then claim your 10 days free trial now and see it on your own how it
can benefit your business.