The business world has changed as most businesses have shifted online, and they are using the available online service, which has advanced features and offers maximum data security and privacy as well as a strong connection with customers. All we can say is everything is moving to cloud technology. In fact, businesses want to make your phone system cost-effective, readily available, and attain every possible customer’s call.
Well, it may not be possible with a traditional PBX( It stands for Private Branch Exchange, where a private telephone network allows users to talk to each other) system.
In this scenario, you are most likely to come across cloud telephony services. You may find some doubts about understanding the essentials of cloud telephony, its features, how it works, how it benefits your business, and how to choose your cloud telephony provider.
To help you know cloud telephony completely, we have come up with this guide.
What is Cloud Telephony?
As per Tech Target, Cloud telephony, also known as cloud calling, is a kind of unified communications as a service (UCaaS) that provides voice communication services through a third-party host.
Basically, it is a voice and messaging service that works on communication platforms/ applications and storage on the cloud. You can move from PBX to the cloud with cloud telephony.
In most companies, the PBX service system is no longer in the office (on-premises) and uses cloud computing to manage business calls. In cloud telephony, incoming and outgoing calls are routed through Cloud Servers.
What are cloud phones?
Cloud phones are a type of phone system where the internet/cloud is used for connection versus having a physical PBX box or hardwired telephone lines. Cloud phone helps you modernise your technology and add more functionality to your phone system. This allows you to make and receive calls on your computer, smartphone, or tablet, just as you would on a traditional phone system.
Cloud phones are hosted in one or more off-site secure data centres. The main difference between a cloud phone system and others is that the cloud phone provider owns all the technology, so the customer doesn’t have to deal with constant maintenance or updates.
Components of cloud telephony
- A Dedicated phone number (Incoming) which is used by customers to make a call. It can be a Mobile number or a Toll-Free number. These virtual numbers are used to just forward incoming calls to one of the PRI(Primary Rate Interface) lines in the data centre (cloud).
- Cloud Telephony Servers, which have lots of PRI lines (processes). These cloud-based servers offer call recording, IVR, reporting, API and lots of other functionalities. This is typically hosted in reliable data centres with good infrastructure and redundant connectivity. Actually, the calls to the published number actually get forwarded to these PRI lines.
- Extensions or landing numbers or Agent Numbers (landing the calls) where the call actually lands. These numbers can be the mobile numbers of your Team Members or your office landline numbers.
Products of cloud telephony
- Toll-free number: It is a virtual number that lets your callers call you for free.
- Virtual number: It is a 10-digit business phone number. They are also called Direct Inward Dialing numbers (DID). Although these numbers only exist virtually, calls to such phone numbers can be routed to existing landlines or mobile phones.
- Distributed Call Centre: It manages all your call centres from a single centralised location on the cloud.
- Interactive Voice Response: Here, an IVR interacts with callers via DTMF keypad tones and voice and routes calls as per callers’ requirements.
- Bulk SMS: This product enables businesses to send large numbers of business SMS to different recipients all at once.
How does cloud telephony work?
Cloud Telephony is one of the best customer experience tools used by small offices, multiple branches, contact centres, and call centres. Furthermore, cloud telephony uses an internet connection to allow users to make and receive calls from their desktop or mobile handsets.
Cloud telephony works by converting analog voice signals into data packets and transmitting them over an internet connection. When a user dials a phone number from a VoIP desk phone, the call is routed by a third-party VoIP service provider.
The basic process includes:
A business gets its cloud number and puts it on the website or online sites. Think of a scenario where Customer A calls you, and at the same time, another Customer B calls you. You can pick up calls from Customer A while the call from Customer B will be routed to another salesperson in real-time.
Basically, the entire business phone system is migrated to cloud communications. In general, cloud telephony service providers offer a multi-tenant access model in which businesses can subscribe to the provider’s range of resources on a monthly basis.
Are Business VOIP(Voice Over Internet Protocol) and Cloud Phone Systems the same?
The short answer is, yes, they are. But there is a fine line between the two of them. All in all, in terms of functionality, the differences are significant between a business VoIP and a cloud phone system.
8 Features of a Great Cloud Telephony Services
-
A stand-alone business number
Cloud Telephony works with a Virtual Number, which can be associated with multiple phone numbers or devices. Even if your company has multiple locations, branches, departments, and users, this phone system allows you to receive customer calls from any device and route them to your chosen device. You can even mask the customer number and create a single identity for your company.
-
Real-time Screen
Cloud Telephony’s real-time screen feature ensures good call quality and assists businesses in monitoring employee activities and performance.
Managers can check on their teams’ activities from their desks, whether they are in a call conversation, dis-positioning a call, dialling a customer call, or on a break. Managers or team leaders can use tools to participate in an ongoing call to listen or listen and talk to the employee alone without being heard by the customer or to engage in conversation with the customer and the employee. These all eventually assist managers in checking call quality and intervening in a call to assist employees in dealing with a demanding customer.
You must drag and drop data across all possible points to gain valuable insights for making quick decisions. You can create and visualise insights through analysis in any way you want and make accurate decisions.
-
You can get detailed call analytics.
Cloud telephony provides exceptional services in terms of reports and analytics, including detailed call analytics, that assist businesses in understanding where they are. These analytics give businesses a clear picture of call details, agent call logs, dropped calls, connected calls, answered calls, and so on. Furthermore, you can compare campaigns, estimate agent calls, and track individual agent performance.
-
Agent CTI
What is the value of innovative technologies applied to your business that are not at all user-friendly? Well, there is no such issue with cloud telephony because it includes the Agent CTI feature.
Agent CTI is a cloud telephony feature that includes an integrated dialer for making outbound calls and receiving incoming calls with ease. Agent CTI can send SMS, draft emails, schedule follow-ups, receive an incoming call, dial an outbound call with a click, update call status, write comments, take a call, and transfer calls.
-
Text to Speech
TTS is a powerful feature of cloud telephony that uses a computer-generated voice to engage callers. The audio is easily generated using a text script, and the spoken version is automatically updated. In addition, businesses can avail of single TTS across multiple contacts or dynamic TTS for each individual contact. This thus reduces human workload while providing personalised service. Interestingly, businesses can always upload a recorded human voice.
-
Sticky Agent
Customers can have some of the favourite call attendees, and they would love to talk to them for queries or complaints. However transferring a customer call to the right executive can be hectic. So this process can be automated with the Sticky Agent feature of Cloud Telephony.
A Sticky Agent is a feature that helps a customer connect to the same sales agent repeatedly whenever he calls, and this eases the work of both parties. Furthermore, it allows customers to connect automatically with the same agent with whom they had the conversation before.
All in all, this feature saves time, reduces lead mismanagement, and eventually builds strong trust and improves conversion rates.
-
Interactive voice response system (IVRS)
An interactive voice response (IVR) system is a telephone system that combines pre-recorded messages or text-to-speech technology with a dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) interface.
IVRS’ features are welcome messages, single and multi-level IVR, an intelligent routing system based on skill, language and time, automatic call distribution, automated responses in the form of SMS, automated Email notification, generated lead or sales lead, etc. IVRS enables customers to communicate with a computer one-on-one via voice configuration and DTMF inputs.
-
Custom Dashboard
Dashboards are used to monitor performance, generate reports, and provide access to functions and information that are critical to your business’s operations. If you are looking for a data visualisation tool that is tailored to your business needs, the custom dashboards feature in cloud telephony is your go-to tool.
With a simple drag and drop, the custom dashboard feature in cloud telephony monitors agent performance and provides ultimate reporting flexibility. Managers or designated leaders can analyse data from all possible angles to gain valuable insights, create and visualise the insights, and ultimately make accurate decisions.
7 Key Benefits of Cloud Telephony
-
Cloud telephony solutions significantly reduce your company’s costs.
Traditional desk phone systems are no longer necessary with cloud telephony. You do not have to worry about installation or maintenance costs. In addition, because everything is stored on your employee’s laptop, these cloud telephony solutions take up no office space. With so many costs managed, your company can save up to all of the revenue that covers these month-end bills.
-
High mobility and flexibility
This is the age of flexible work policies, and most people are looking for remote work. In fact, highly mobile and flexible is what future workspaces are going to be. This is certainly something businesses are looking for. So businesses can create a flexible and highly mobile workspace using cloud telephony.
While companies can assume remote working conditions to be best for freelance writers or designers, this is not the case; it can help any employee.
Thus, managers can evaluate work policies and establish mobile and flexible work policies. And if they find it favourable, cloud telephony service can be availed, allowing employees to take their work mobile. All your employees would need a device with a stable Internet connection with a cloud telephony app installed to take care of your business.
Furthermore, the company can reduce its expenditure due to desktops. The gist is that cloud telephony helps any organisation by allowing agents to work from any place with just the requirement of an internet connection.
-
With cloud telephony solutions, you can enjoy scalability and customisation.
Cloud telephony solutions are highly scalable, customisable, and adaptable to changing business needs. Businesses can scale up or down their infrastructure based on service demand with unprecedented speed and ease when using cloud-based solutions.
According to reports, SMEs that switch to cloud telephony, i.e. single toll-free number, see a 62% increase in incoming calls. Cloud telephony can provide you with a customised solution when you need to add ten new members to your sales team’s cloud telephony account or when you need a new customised feature to make your CRM system integration run more smoothly.
Furthermore, with a dedicated 24×7 support team on hand, you can keep track of all progress at all times. Overall, cloud telephony reduces businesses by eliminating overhead costs paid to multiple vendors and network connectivity providers.
-
You can go green and reduce your carbon footprint with Sustainable Cloud Solutions.
Cloud-based telephony systems eliminate the need for such power-hungry servers and redundant infrastructure. You can use this to transition to a paperless working model. These cloud services do not necessitate large amounts of energy-consuming infrastructure. Adopting cloud telephony solutions can help you contribute to global climate change.
Cloud telephony products have the potential to transform your marketing and promotion strategies while simultaneously reducing your carbon footprint.
Overall, cloud telephony can be your first step toward a more sustainable business, as incorporating green practices into all aspects of the business not only saves money in the long run but also helps build a better brand image.
-
You can relish rich business features.
It is common practice to evaluate and comprehend how your company has performed in recent months before making necessary changes to business plans. Businesses will require extensive statistics as well as simple graphs to accomplish this. It is also necessary to obtain key insights and visual aids.
What if you could use a single technology instead of delegating the task to a large group of people? Cloud telephony alone can do it for you. Real-time analytics, voicemail drops, post-call surveys, and a variety of other features are available to help your business become more automated.
-
Highly efficient sales and support teams
The sales team is an essential component of any business. You can’t expect to increase sales unless you build and maintain healthy relationships with your customers. Every day, sales representatives must make multiple sales calls, and more than half of their time is spent on manual work.
In this situation, cloud telephony can assist you in organising and streamlining these tasks. Most importantly, sales representatives can use the cloud telephony Auto Dialer to accomplish this.
This Auto dialer allows you to make calls, drop messages, and voicemails automatically. Your sales or support representative would not have to perform any of this process manually. When manual work is reduced, your sales and support teams’ efficiency and productivity skyrocket.
-
You can enjoy reliable and resilient phone service.
Your on-site telephony systems and office desktops are likely to be destroyed in the event of a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or a landslide.
As a result, you must have dependable and resilient cloud telephony that facilitates disaster recovery. Furthermore, even if your system goes down or your laptops crash, your data is not lost because cloud telephony solutions have cloud storage. Furthermore, it can be accessed at any time from any other device.
5 Major cloud telephony trends in 2024
- Cloud Integration with more enterprise software as a lot of companies is moving towards SaaS services for different departments and demands.
- VoIP technology and the Internet of Things (IoT) will continue to rule the market. In fact, VoIP with IoT will bring great ability to transmit data to any location more reliably and securely.
- Wider adoption of VoIP by small businesses as VOIP offers a seamless voice service, easy access via the cloud, and generous scalability.
- 5G going mainstream in 2024 is one of the top trends of the UCaaS ecosystem to watch, which means improved mobile broadband connection and super-fast browsing speeds.
- Omnichannel Communications and connections allow companies to keep field workers and front-of-office teams connected. Your cloud calling provider can also provide access to other applications and tools, such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, through APIs and integrations.
Things to consider when choosing a cloud telephony service provider
With so many providers offering cloud telephony services, it’s critical to develop a strategy for shortlisting those that align with your business goals, provide the appropriate level of ongoing support for you and your team, and help in making a smooth business continuity.
Here are major things you need to check when selecting a cloud telephony provider for your business
-
Check if they have the technology requirements, features and integrations.
As a business, you must evaluate your team’s essential requirements, such as basic calling functionality required for day-to-day integrations, employees’ immediate impact, and the establishment of clear objectives to deal with day-to-day challenges. As a result, ensure that the cloud telephony system you select addresses this issue and provides integrations tailored to your teams, such as marketing automation platforms.
-
See their security and compliance services.
Before you commit to a specific provider, make sure they value security. Check to see if they provide call encryption and a secure real-time transport protocol.
Also, consider how your data will be stored and whether specific compliance requirements are required based on your business needs. You should ensure that your supplier adheres to the global standard for security threat responses.
-
Service Quality and SLA’s
An SLA includes service-level objectives, caveats and exclusions, remediation policies and penalties. Thus, you should always read your provider’s SLA (service level agreement) carefully. Furthermore, when looking for a cloud provider’s SLA, look for one that guarantees 99.999% uptime.
-
Their reputation in the industry and financial health
Finding reputable cloud telephony is another thing businesses must focus on. Researching a potential cloud telephony provider’s reputation is easy these days, all thanks to the internet. But as a customer, you must look for unbiased customer reviews, case studies, and testimonials to ensure you’ve chosen a reputable and reliable supplier. Along with that, it’s also essential to learn about your potential provider’s financial health to ensure that they have a solid, stable foundation to support you in the long run.
Why choose NSWIT Support for the best telecom services for your business?
At NSWIT Support, we believe that clear business communication is crucial to keep business strategy intact and achieve business goals. We offer various digital services, including telecom services. Our cloud telecom service is of enterprise-grade security with great uptime SLA. Under our telecom services, we offer business telephony, unified communication services, VOIP systems, VOIP plans, and business internet plans.
Under our Business Telephone Service, we offer PSTN phones, ISDN phones, Hosted PBX, VoIP, and SIP Trunk. We also provide customised VoIP System services to our clients, which are cost-effective. Further, we effectively minimise your telecom expenses and create further business opportunities. Our VoIP service includes installation, configuration, maintenance, and software updates. Moreover, we also offer our business internet plans in various packages which serve you best.
So, if you are looking for the best Cloud telephony provider in Australia, then you can choose us. To know more about us or get your cloud service-related queries solved, you can contact us.
