The Business Benefits of Cloud Based Telephony

This Industry Viewpoint was authored by David Bell, Digital Marketing Executive at Tripudio Telecom. The Tripudio team will be at the Call Centre and Customer Management Expo on the 2^nd and 3^rd October 2013 at the London Olympia Exhibition Centre.

It would appear that ‘cloud’ seems to be the answer to everyone’s problems these days. ‘Cloud computing’, ‘cloud networking’ and ‘cloud based hosting’ are common phrases amongst most businesses and organisations, regardless of the size and nature of their operation. Another cloud based solution that’s becoming more popular is ‘Cloud Based Telephony’.

Fundamentally, thanks to Cloud Based Telephony, a PC, softphone and broadband connection is all you need now to be a home worker or even be part of an agent pool; as such systems can scale to literally thousands. Many businesses are taking advantage of hosted IP telephones to connect their entire workforce acting as a single ‘internal’ network, sometimes crossing many international locations either using local broadband, Ethernet and SIP trunks, meaning business goals can be met at lower costs, with greater flexibility and in faster timescales.

A hosted VoIP phone system is a fully-managed service that works over something as simple as standard broadband connection. The core platform of the service is hosted in the ‘cloud’, allowing users and administrators to access and set system preferences through a central online portal. Essentially, the users are accessing a partition of a very large, scalable and service capable multi-channel telephony platform. The kind of platform your organisation may not be able to justify on a stand-alone basis, but delivers much needed business benefits. The flexible nature of a hosted VoIP system can combine office, home and mobile workers creating a single unified system.

The key benefits enjoyed are scalability, reliability and service choice. As an example, confident users can have advanced features such as contact centre ACD queues and IVR, whereas others can stick to a traditional ‘dial tone’ and voice mail. Those that have more ‘advanced’ contact centre services would typically pay more for these. Those that have the more ‘simple’ PABX services would usually pay at a lower monthly charge. Your business’ telephony structure can expand as your customer base grows and when service demands peaks, thanks to the scalability and accessibility of cloud based telephony.

Of course, cloud based telephony has its other perks; environmentally. A greater number of companies are opting to use remote workers or ‘telecommuters’ with a little help from cloud based IP telephones. Allowing your labour force the opportunity to work from home has huge environmental benefits is proven to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by up to 25%. In terms of productivity and efficiency, workers are 20% more productive than those that compute into work and home workers take fewer sick days. It is reported that of BT’s 92,000 employees, 15,000 of them are homeworkers which saves them on average £6,000 per worker per year.

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Categories: Cloud Computing · Industry Viewpoint · VoIP