Want to know how your small business can benefit from cloud telephony?
Imagine you call a business, which business would you trust — one that plays a professional welcome message and asks you to choose the department you’d like to talk to from a menu, or one that was attended by a person, who asks you which department you’d like to speak to and screams on the other end an agent’s name?
Earlier only those enterprises with deep pockets could afford an elaborate phone system with voicemail, Interactive Voice Response, Call routing capabilities and more advanced features. Small businesses were at a disadvantage and their image had to suffer — not anymore.
Small and Medium businesses stand to benefit the most out of cloud telephony, they have changed the game for SMBs and enabled them to compete on par with bigger businesses.
Why are small businesses moving to the cloud?
Cloud telephony by nature has a ton of capabilities that fit the exact needs of SMBs-
- They are affordable
- They can be setup with no technical help
- They require no maintenance
- They can be scaled easily
- They provide mobility
On premise phone systems are dying — in fact, the FCC voted in 2016 to gradually retire legacy copper networks and began the transition to internet based telephony services.
The following factors make cloud telephony attractive especially to small businesses:
1. Scalability
Software advice’s buyer report mentions that — “The need for scalability is the top reason for evaluating new VoIP systems.” Small Businesses will grow in the future and this means they need flexibility.
After talking to many of our own customers we understand the benefits, cloud telephony brings to small businesses especially in terms of scalability — many businesses previously using hardphones, once they opened up in different locations and started scaling, their phone system couldn’t keep pace with their rapid growth. They realized that on premise phone systems just wouldn’t cut it.
Adding a user in a cloud phone system is only a click away. There is no need to make any infrastructural changes which would incur substantial costs and would also be time-consuming — two valuable resources that small businesses cannot afford to lose.
2. Integration with business tools
Using different tools can have a detrimental effect on both your customer support and sales processes. Picture a sales agent talking to a prospect, they would have to make important notes, maybe fix a follow up, they may have to keep track of their numerous prospects. Similarly, a support agent would have to follow up with customers multiple times to ensure a query has been resolved.
Hardphones cause hiccups in the process — an agent or rep cannot link their calls to prospects, there would be no way to keep track of their queries and things can become chaotic really quickly. This will affect their productivity and more importantly their morale.
With cloud telephony they can easily integrate their phone system with their CRM or Helpdesk — each call can be attributed to a customer easily. They don’t have to shift between multiple tools and all their data would be in one place.
A streamlined workflow can do wonders for a business. One of our customers were scaling rapidly and ended up missing many calls. Since shifting to a cloud phone system, in their own words — “they added much needed order into their chaotic workflow” and were able to reduce their missed calls by upto 35%.
3. Analytics and Reporting
In today’s world you’d be aware that the one with data is king. Easily accessible data is important to analyze and take business decisions — according to a study by Deloitte, 72% of companies believe they can use analytics to improve their customer experience.
Most on premise phone systems lack analytics, there is no way to know or understand the performance of your teams or measure customer satisfaction. For a small business this can make all the difference, businesses that are proactive in their approach and those which set targets and closely monitor their performance tend to fare better than those which don’t. For small businesses being in the dark is a risk they cannot afford to take.
A small business phone system empowers them with data using features like call recording, they can go back and analyze what they are doing right and where they are going wrong. With valuable analytics in their hands, small businesses can now quantitatively measure their performance and deliver better customer experiences.
4. Mobility
Customers expect a prompt reply when they have queries — not being at your desk is no excuse for missing customer calls. Small business can score big points when it comes to customer service, while bigger businesses may find it hard to provide personalized and prompt customer service.
Business that are stuck up with an on premise system are tied to their desks (and the past). Small businesses can leverage cloud telephony to respond to customers quickly no matter where they are — all they’ll need is a working internet connection. This provides great flexibility to small business owners, they can always be connected even if they are out of office.
This also opens up the possibility for remote working and telecommuting. A study by CoSo Cloud shows that 77% of employees report being more productive while working remotely — remote work is on the rise and is here to stay.
Small businesses also stand to benefit the most out of this — space can be a big factor for startups and hiring remotely means they save on rent, also it gives them the flexibility to hire agents temporarily in case they require additional bandwidth. Remote work is also good for the environment — even a big brand like Dell experimented with remote work and found that their U.S. workforce avoids 2.7 billion round-trips per year by telecommuting — this is equivalent to a reduction in commuting footprint of 30 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
5. Cost Savings
Small businesses have a need to be economical and when it comes to cost savings, there is nothing better than a cloud phone system.
According to tech.co, VoIP can trim down initial costs for startup business by roughly 90%. Think about it — if not for cloud telephony — small businesses have to procure hardphones, get telephone cables, setup servers, hire technical help and not to mention rent out an incredible amount of space only to accommodate your phone system, add to that recurring maintenance charges and contracts that keep you locked up with this setting for at least 3–5 years.
For local calls, a small business that moves to VoIP can expect to see as compared to their current system, this is because most cloud phone systems provide cheaper call rates, also businesses can buy local numbers in other countries and call at local rates using cloud phone systems.
About Freshcaller
Freshcaller is a plug-n-play cloud phone system for every type of business, and helps augment customer engagement and collaboration within internal teams. Users can purchase local and toll-free numbers, get real-time visibility into call queues and ongoing conversations, route calls to specific agent groups, set up custom business hours for each department, and more.
If you want to find out more about what we do, check out www.freshcaller.com.
Originally published at https://www.freshworks.com on September 2, 2019.
