If you haven’t been living under a rock, you must already hear how moving to the cloud can result in huge cost savings for businesses. You might also be thinking of upgrading your communication network to a cloud telephony system. There is no denying the fact that you can save a lot of money by switching to cloud telephony as compared to the traditional telephone system as you only need to pay for the services used and there is no need to spend money on hardware. The setup costs are also minimal.
However, there is a lot more to cloud telephony regarding savings. When you move to cloud telephony, you won’t just save money on hardware but also in several other ways that you may have never thought about before.
Here is a list of four unexpected ways you can save money through cloud telephony:
- Seamless Integration with Various Other Tools
The traditional telephony systems are completely isolated, and it is not possible to integrate them with other tools commonly used by businesses. For instance, integration of your customer success tools or your CRM software with the telephone system can lead to huge improvements in employee productivity. Without direct integration of telephony system with the CRM system, the inbound sales executive is forced to manually fill in all the call details into the system. It leads to a lot of time wastage as sales executives have to spend a lot of time on doing data entry instead of spending that time out in the field making sales.
On the other hand, a high-quality cloud telephony system is capable of integrating directly with various customer success tools including Freshdesk and Zendesk. It means that a sales executive has, at their fingertips, all the details of the caller as well as complete customer history without the need to ask any unnecessary questions. Needless to say, all the time spent by executives on asking unnecessary questions to callers is lost productivity, and you can save millions of dollars over time by integrating your telephone system with customer success tools.
Also, customers also get irritated as they have to repeatedly answer these questions. It’s 2018, and customers expect businesses to have a record of their history. These may seem to be small factors, but in this highly competitive business environment, such small things may be the only advantage your business has over your competitors.
- Make Training Easy and Efficient
Employers need to be trained, and if you can find a way to train them quickly, they can start contributing to your business which will enhance the overall levels of productivity. Time is money, and the more time you save on training your team, higher will be your ROI from their salaries. While companies spend a lot of money on training their employees but training programs are often not that effective. Thankfully, cloud telephony also has the additional benefit of making it easier to train your employees while they are working.
A cloud telephony system also comes with a great feature called call recording. Every single call, outbound or inbound, can be recorded. These recordings can be used to tell people the mistakes they are making and ways to improve their work.
Here is how you can use this data to improve the performance of your sales team. When the calling system is integrated with your CRM system, a lot of data is generated about the performance of an individual sales executive. This data can be used by sales leaders to learn how other team members can improve their performance. CRM can be used by sales leaders to provide sales coaching sessions to other team members and train them to do better.
- Cheaper Rent
Office rent is usually one of the biggest expenses of running a business. However, technology has now enabled a lot of businesses all around the world to move to a virtual office instead of a physical office. Cloud-based tools have made it easy for businesses to allow people to keep working from their homes with just an Internet connection.
For instance, a remote customer support team can be run with the help of cloud telephony tools. If you’re wondering, a cloud telephony system can also ensure the availability of people to take the call even though it’s not possible for you to see them. However, there is no need to worry as the cloud hosted phone system will ensure that the calls are rooted to executives that are available which means customers won’t have to wait till someone is available to pick up. Also, if you worry that employees may goof off and waste time instead of working, you can use various other tools such as Time Doctor to track the amount of time employees spend at their desk.
Similarly, salespeople can also be allowed to work from home. One big advantage of a cloud telephone system is that a business is not required to spend any money or time on installation of a traditional telephone system in the homes of employees.
- Open up More Opportunities
There are several business verticals with seasonal opportunities. For instance, the festive season is the busiest for digital goods retail businesses. However, increased sales also come with the added increase in support requests.
One of the biggest problems with such periodic or seasonal opportunities is that businesses are required to scale up their resources only for that particular period. If you have a traditional telephone system, you will need to do a lot of planning regarding deployment time and other such things that would cost a lot of money. On the other hand, cloud telephone makes it extremely easy for you to scale up or scale down the capacity as per your needs.
The hiring of additional temporary staff may be needed for handling extra calls, but that is not the case always. A custom interactive voice response system can be quickly created by you to answer most of the common queries raised by your customers, or you can also use the IVR to guide them to a solution. Perhaps, the biggest advantage is that your communication lines will not be full of angry customers or possible refund requests as there will always be someone who will take care of your customers.
You can use cloud telephone system to take advantage of such seasonal opportunities with much less stress and minimal costs.
Conclusion
If you still haven’t changed to a cloud telephony solution, you need to try it out now. After all, you have the option of scaling it back if things don’t work out.
