4 Unexpected Ways in which Cloud Telephony Saves your Business’ Costs

You have heard that moving to the cloud can bring in huge cost savings for your business. And you might be thinking of upgrading to a cloud telephony system.

You also know that cloud telephony is far cheaper than a traditional system. You don’t need to invest in hardware, there are minimal setup costs and you pay as you go.

But that’s just the beginning. Moving to cloud communications can save you money in ways that you have never thought about before. And those savings can be much more than what you would save on hardware!

Curious?

Here are 4 unexpected ways in which cloud telephony saves you money:

1. Integration with Other Tools

The trouble with traditional telephony systems, is that they are isolated systems. You will not integrate them with other tools.

For instance, integrating your telephony system with your CRM or your Customer Success tool can make a huge difference to your employee productivity.

If your phone system does not integrate with your CRM, your inbound sales executive will have to manually fill in the call details into the CRM, during or after the call. Would you rather have them waste their time doing data entry that or spend that time talking to more customers?

Similarly a Cloud Telephony system can integrate with customer success tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk etc. Therefore, an executive can have all the details of the caller and the customer history at their fingertips without having to ask them unnecessary questions. Every minute spent asking and answering a question is a drain on your employee productivity and a waste of money. Over time, these numbers add up to millions of dollars.

And don’t forget the uncalculated cost of the customer’s irritation at having to answer those questions. In 2017, they would expect you to know all about their history! These are small factors that push the customer towards considering a move to your competitor!

2. A More Competent Team

How quickly can you train your new employees to perform at high levels of productivity? The sooner your team becomes more capable, the more money you save and the higher is the ROI from their salaries. Companies spend millions on training their people but often, training programs are not that effective.

A cloud telephony system can make it far easier for you to train your employees – on the job.

Knowlarity’s cloud telephony system also has a call recording feature. Every single interaction with a caller – inbound or outbound can be recorded. Referring to call recordings is one of the easiest ways point out to people what mistakes they are making and how they can improve.

Here’s another example of how this can help you improve your salespeople’s performance. A CRM integrated with a calling system has a lot of data about an individual salesperson’s performance. Sales leaders can look at that data to draw insights about where their team members might need to improve. They can use the CRM as a basis for holding sales coaching sessions with their team members, and explore ways in which they can do better.

3. Save on Office Rent

One of the biggest costs that a business has is office rent. However, a growing number of companies around the world are moving away from a physical office format to a virtual office. One reason why this has become easier is because of the advent of cloud based tools that allow people to work from their homes, as long as they have an internet connection.

For example, image that you are running a remote customer support team. How do you ensure that your people will be there to take the call, and do not goof off? After all, you can’t really see them right?

But, honestly, you don’t need to worry about that anymore! A cloud telephony system will route the call to available executives only, so that your customers don’t have to wait for someone to pick up. And if goofing off is a genuine concern for you, other tools like Time Doctor can be used to track how much time your employees are at their desks, but that’s a different story.

Similarly, you can have inside salespeople who are working from home. A cloud communications system means that you don’t have to spend any time or money in installing traditional phone systems in their residences.

4. Pursue More Opportunities

Several businesses have opportunities which are seasonal. Digital goods retail businesses, for example, sell more during the festive seasons. Anytime you sell more, you should also expect to have a proportionate increase in support requests during that period.

The trouble with any seasonal or periodic opportunity is that you need to scale up your resources during that specific time. With traditional telephony systems, that takes a lot of planning, deployment time, not to mention that it’s expensive. However, if you are using cloud telephony, you can scale up your capacity very quickly, and scale it down, when the period is over. You might have to hire additional temporary staff to handle extra calls, but not always. You can quickly create a custom IVR that can answer most of your customers questions or guide them towards a solution. In the least, your lines will not get clogged with an influx of calls – leading to angry customers and possible refund requests.

Cloud telephony allows you to pursue these periodic opportunities with minimal costs and perhaps more importantly – save you a major headache!

Conclusion

If you are not sure about taking a cloud telephony solution, feel safe to try it out! You can always scale it back if you don’t like it!

About Peter Banerjea

Peter is Co-Founder of SuccessIsWhat.com. He is also a marketing advisor at Knowlarity, a leading cloud communications company with 15,000+ customers across 65 countries.