In this blog, we will explain to you how cloud telephony solutions can streamline your business communications and help you grow your business. Whether you’re opening new offices, hiring remote workers, or expanding your in-house teams, a cloud telephony solution will make your expansion effortless and cost-effective.
Cloud Telephony is a communications technology where all communication devices and applications are hosted at the service provider’s premises. Any business interested in using these services does not need to install any software or buy any hardware to get the services started. The service can be an IVR, call center setup, call recording, virtual number, or call forwarding. These services can be started on a traditional phone, mobile, or a computer system i.e. desktop, laptop, or tablet.
No matter how small or big your business is or what it does, voice communication is a critical element of success. With voice communication, you get a secure way to communicate with customers, contact prospective clients, and operate your business. Cloud telephony can help businesses to incorporate these voice communication benefits effectively.
In a conventional setup, to start any enterprise telephony solution like a PBX or small call center, you need a dedicated PRI, a PRI server, and a conventional call center solution. Whereas in a cloud telephony solution, all the devices like PRI Line, application server, etc. are hosted or reside at the service provider’s premises and all applications/devices are maintained by the service provider.
It’s also known as a VoIP-based hosted PBX solution. It helps you move your business phone service to the cloud.
It is a type of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). And the reason is that it brings various communication systems and collaboration tools together. With cloud telephony, you won’t just move your phone calls to the cloud, but also connect them with your video meetings, instant messaging, CRM, and business processes across the board. It also sets the stage for adding complementary UCaaS features, such as voice and keyword analysis, call center capabilities, interactive voice response (IVR), and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled customer support.
Cloud telephony may have numerous use cases. However, cloud telephony is required by companies that have a number published to the customers. They require a setup for their inbound calls and cloud telephony is the best option available to them. Similarly, companies that have tele-callers making outbound calls to their customers also require a setup to monitor agents’ performance and get complete call metrics. For them as well, Cloud Telephony is the most effective setup available.
Let us check first the flow of incoming calls in the cloud telephony setup:
Cloud telephony is required when a company has a number published to its customers and wants to have a call center set up for inbound at the minimum cost. The number that is published could be a landline or a PRI number, a mobile number, or a toll-free number as well. However, I always recommend my clients to have a mobile number due to its flexibility and cost-effectiveness.
The calls coming to this number are then simply forwarded to your cloud telephony service provider. They will provide you with a PRI number and you can forward your calls there. If the IVR is there, then it will play and once your customer chooses the required option, the calls are then forwarded to your team agents’ mobile numbers or your landline number as the case may be.
Call distribution can be done based on some pre-defined rules or based on Input given by the customer on the IVR
In this setup, you get access to call recordings and all call metrics and you can also do number masking
There could be two ways of doing outbound calls using cloud telephony.
In the first case, your agent logs in to a CRM which will provide click-to-call functionality already integrated into it. This initiates a call from the server to the agent first and then the call is initiated to the customer. Once the customer picks up the call, the calls are then patched and the agent is connected to the customer on the cloud. But this method of outbound calling is a bit expensive since two parallel calls are running and then patched. One is from the server to the agent and the other one is from the server to the customer. You get call recordings and other call productivity metrics that are required to track your agent’s performance.
I recommend the next solution as it is easy to use and cost-effective as well.
With this solution, the agent will be given a mobile application with login credentials. The supervisor is being given a panel from where he would push the data via Excel file or CSV file, APIs, manually and will then allocate the database to the agents. Once the agent logs in to his ID, he can see the database on his panel and can start calling on it using his mobile only. Agents can enter their call details on a mobile CRM or a desktop CRM as well. The call recordings and durations will also move from mobile to cloud. The supervisor or the manager will be able to get real-time monitoring of productivity. He gets access to recordings, dashboards, and analytics using his panel.
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