Emerging Market of Cloud Telephony: Benefits for SME's

The Internet of things is changing our worlds like never before. Everything that we can imagine, is establishing its connectivity to the internet.
 

Consider the telephone for example. It is one of the most successful channels of business and popular sources of customer engagement, that is now being extended for use via the cloud services.
 

What is Cloud Telephony?

With the commencement of cloud telephony, our old telephone has now moved a level up to cloud services. Cloud telephony is a service that transforms your business phone to a company phone system that is entirely based on cloud, thus easing much of your task.
 

It replaces phone systems like PBX, EPABX and is pretty simple for everyone to understand. It majorly works on networks like IP and PSTN.
 

The process of hanging up, disconnecting, transferring, playing an audio file and forwarding of call has become understandable and less baffled through cloud telephony.
 

The future of cloud telephony

Going by the market statistics, it is expected that more than 50 percent of the information technology will be stored on cloud within the next five to ten years.
 

Gartner says that there will be a rise in cloud-based business systems from eight percent to thirty-three percent in 2017.
 

Cloud telephony is not just making its way in the domestic markets but is also a huge hit for businesses internationally.
 

Research also suggests that places like China, Korea, Hong-Kong, Brazil, Russia, and India are expected to have significant implications of cloud telephony. This has led all sorts of businesses to rethink about conventional markets and take a giant leap towards the upcoming low-cost trend of technology.
 

Benefits of cloud telephony for SME

Small and medium enterprises (SME) form the backbone of any economy. Though they are restrained by economic terms, SMEs never miss a chance to experiment with the ongoing trends of technology.
 

Cloud telephony is one such thing that the small and medium enterprises are accepting with alacrity. It has helped them in customer retention, increased customer loyalty along with a significant decrease in the operational costs.
 

Here are the best researched and derived benefits of cloud telephony for SME:
 

1. Increase in productivity

Conventional telephone systems like Private Branch Exchange (PBX) take infinite time to install and operate. These also become difficult for the employee to understand and require a lot of manpower to function.

Cloud telephony provides a high degree of seamless operations. There is no need to get entangled in the customary wires of business phones. Instead, the entire operational business voice workflow has moved wireless.

A virtual call responsive service is installed in your business systems, which makes sure that critical calls for business are not missed under any circumstance. SMEs benefit from these services, by an increased efficiency and ease of scaling for their business. Cloud telephony also requires low maintenance set up and easy installation that comes as another advantage to SMEs.

2. Ease of scale

Small businesses can benefit from cloud telephony with provided ease of scale. Traditionally, your phone system will exponentially grow, when you grow your business. But with cloud telephony, there is no additional burden of increased infrastructure.

You can keep on adding more number of users and customers on a virtual platform rather than increasing the number of actual telephones in your office. Thus, small and medium businesses can easily experiment with upgrading or downgrading their business without worrying about the additional costs involved.

3. Zero setup cost

Cloud telephony simply requires an initial amount as an investment for the cloud telephony service and storage. This accounts for a much less amount in terms of money and time as compared to traditional phone connector setup of PBX.

A cloud telephony service is thus, cost-effective and time-saving. It lifts up quite a huge burden from the economic aspect of small and medium enterprises, as for them budget is one of essential factors of setting up a business.

4. Increased integration

Instead of just letting your telephony system do the simpleton call routing job, you can prefer to stay connected with other kinds of customer information such as when was the last time they spoke to you, their feedbacks, any pending issues etc.

For SMEs, it can be a great opportunity to maintain long-term relationships with their customers. Most of the cloud telephony service providers have simple APIs that allows quick integration within your existing software like helpdesk etc.

“Cloud is all about how you do computing, not where you do computing.”- Paul Maritz

5. Insights to detailed marketing analytics  

Now that all the business data has moved to cloud storage with the services of cloud telephony, there is a wide exposure to customer data for SMEs.

There is a super-abundance of customer information such as their habits, likes, and dislikes. This has led to a better build up of marketing strategies for the SMEs as they can analyze and act upon the plethora of information available.

6. Secure and trustworthy operation

Cloud telephony for business ensures that the data is secure and uninterrupted by events. The information on cloud storage remains safe from floods, tsunamis or even earthquakes, as it is stored virtually.

This means that the SMEs can continue with their business and analysis in sheer confidence. Cloud telephony provides an assurance to the SMEs that they are using the most reliable and trustworthy telephone services for their business activities.

Cloud has an advantage over all sorts of other storage media. All the markets internationally that have this foresight are adopting cloud telephony. It is also expected that the growth of cloud platform industry will be exponential in the coming years.
 

Thus, those SMEs and businesses running globally that are ready to embrace cloud telephony will benefit from it and drastically see an increase in their productivity.