Here’s how Cloud telephony can save your business

One of the major causes of business failure is the absence of strong communication with customers. Businesses often fail to realize how big of a role effective communication plays towards its success. External communication helps attract potential customers and retain existing ones. Through marketing campaigns, you can inform customers about promotions and persuade them to buy your product. Through customer feedback, you can identify areas of improvement and understand your customers better. Knowing your customers better helps you understand when, where and how to connect to them. Cloud Telephony takes care of all your communication needs for you. Cloud Telephony providers strategically help you identify gaps in your communication and provide you the right business tools to reduce these gaps by getting you closer to your customers.

Forbes, Gartner and other reputable firms have identified several communicational and expansion barriers businesses face. Through this blog, you will be able to understand the various ways in which Cloud Telephony helps businesses break through these barriers.

Problem #1: No customer engagement

As time progresses companies lose track of their customer interactions and start focusing solely on operations. It is important for businesses to understand their customers’ needs and engage them with their product. Intense competition in the industry also means that customers have a wide range of products to choose from. By engaging them with your company and differentiating yourself from competitors through deep dialogues with customers, you can not only make their decision-making process easier but also ensure constant sales for your firm.

Solution: Cloud Telephony Solutions ensure that you are better equipped to communicate with your customers than your competitors. They allow you to constantly provide information regarding promotions, campaigns, loyalty awards, feedback, etc. This ensures that customers have readily available content to better understand your company’s offerings. Moreover, higher exposure to your firm makes customers more invested in your products. As a result, you create several opportunities to engage them and guide them through each step of their purchasing cycle.

Problem #2: Insufficient capital

More than half the businesses that fail, attribute their state to insufficient funding to run the business. This problem arises due to a number of reasons like trying to keep up with competitor’s low prices, more cash outflows than inflows, high fixed costs, heavy marketing, banks not loaning to new firms, etc. It is also harder for new businesses to manage funds, collect receivables from customers on time and establish themselves in the industry.

Solution: By eliminating the need to install and constantly update hardware, cloud telephony software makes communication for businesses more cost-effective and provides a higher return on investments. You no longer have to incur heavy fixed costs of equipment or spend periodically for updates. You can are thus able to manage your capital better and be well within budget. You can also invest the saved capital from these services in other necessary aspects in order to grow your business.

Problem #3: Unable to monitor employee performance

As a firm gets bigger, it becomes harder to track and monitor the performance of each and every employee. However, the work of each employee determines the success of a firm and that is why it is important to provide them valuable feedback and assistance. It is also necessary to be able to easily add employees to your system, as you expand and your requirements increase.

Solution: Real-time data and detailed customer, agent and call analytics that cloud telephony providers give will help you keep track of every agent’s performance. Through live-call monitoring and call recordings, you can analyze conversations with customers to identify areas of improvement for the agents. In addition, your agents can also add domain experts on the call to better address a technical question out of their scope. Through this option, they can also learn from well-trained employees and improve their performance. These features of cloud telephony services help you provide agents with personalized training and feedback without putting in the extra effort. This efficiency allows agents more time to address every customer with full support.

Problem #4: Lack of the ability to work remotely

With growing a busy comes the need to be able to work remotely, be it for the need to travel to meet new suppliers or communicate with a potential customer in another country. It is impossible to be in the office every time to conduct all business related tasks. Companies find it challenging to manage customers in different regions and keep up with the ever growing customer base.

Solution: Cloud telephony-based solutions give you this ability. It allows you to use just one number to take calls from any device, anywhere, and at any time. Through virtual phone numbers your customers use only one number to contact you, and you can direct these calls to any business line/device of your choice. Having local area codes will allow you to make long distance calls without having to incur long distance costs and give your customers a local perception of your firm, increasing their trust.

Problem #5: Inefficient internal communication

Oftentimes information gets lost and distorted by the time it reaches the end person, especially if the company is large and the chain of command is too long. It is important to make sure that all employees of the firm are on the same page and portray the same picture to customers. Large companies face problems of inefficient internal communication and that is why it is important to ensure that all information is easily available and accessible. Continuous internal communication also ensures that everything is succinct and in line with the company’s policies.

Solution: Cloud telephony service providers help you make your internal communication effortless and come together as an organization. Sometimes it takes multiple heads to solve a problem and for these times you can easily add all the employees, even those working from home, on the call through call conferencing. When an agent is talking to a customer he/she can make notes about the customer/ the reason of their call in order to make this information available for the agent in the next shift, if the customer calls again. This leads to the agent having all the necessary information instead of needing to ask the customer again. You can add people on ongoing calls or transfer calls to other people without any hassle. These services help create a more collaborative work culture and increases productivity within the firm. 

Problem #6: Inability to scale

There are several instances in which firms are successfully operating in the industry but, are unable to expand potential markets because of the inability to scale their business operations. Once a market is saturated it is important to expand presence in order to grow the business. But, it becomes hard to manage all activities if there is no flexibility to scale them.

Solution: Cloud-based telephony solutions provide access to all information on the cloud, so scaling calls for no additional infrastructure or manual labour becomes easy. You can easily add more business lines within the same phone number and seamlessly manage caller traffic. Cloud telephony solutions makes it possible for your business to direct communications into one single channel without any restrictions. As a result, your business has the flexibility to scale up or down without impacting the quality of your customer relations in any way. This also gives your firm leeway to reallocate resources to other functions of your business that need to be scaled.

It is easy to identify problems in retrospect and see why a company failed. However, when you are a part of the everyday business activities it is hard to identify the bottleneck before things start going down hill. Through cloud telephony systems you can make sure that there are solutions to your problems even before they arise. You can easily avoid the barriers conventional firms face by making your customers a part of your company. This enables you to be ahead of the competition satisfy all your stakeholders, at the same time.