6 Reasons Why Every Startup Should Choose Cloud Telephony Over On-Premise

1. Easy to Install & Get Started

While using a traditional on-premise system, every business needs to invest effort, money & time to set up a full-fledged communication system. Everything is handled by the organisation itself, from researching the right set of infrastructure to purchasing a complex set of hardware & software, installing it and making sure it works without any glitch. This cumbersome process takes a toll on the company’s effort & resources which decelerates the whole process and makes it inefficient.

On the contrary, with cloud telephony, you do not need to indulge in the process of searching, buying, installing and maintaining the system. Being proficient in their work, cloud telephony service providers take care of all these complex processes at their end. The service providers already have a well-built infrastructure in place to cater to the varying requirements of different businesses.

In order to get started with cloud telephony service, you only need to have a computer, internet, headset and agents to access the cloud services and get started with customer calls. This makes the setup process quicker and disposes of the redundant tasks from the to-do list of the business.

2. Low Infrastructure Cost

Money is one of the most influential and powerful aspects of any business decision. Cloud telephony saves a lot of business cost as they do not need to worry about purchasing the infrastructure or hiring dedicated staff to look over the maintenance of the system. Everything gets taken care of by the cloud telephony providers which saves a lot of infrastructure cost.

With cloud service, the business only has to pay for the services it opts for, unlike on-premise system. Additionally, in the case of the on-premise system, businesses are pushed to go for monthly/yearly plans where the usage of the minutes and services are fixed. In such cases, a business has to pay the monthly expense irrespective of the utilisation of the minutes and channels. Whereas with cloud telephony, the business follows a “pay-as-you-use” model, i.e., they only need to pay for the purchased service and the number of communication channels they utilise. This prevents over-expenditure and channelises the money in other critical business areas.

3. Quick Scalability

When it comes to expanding your business, one of the major challenges faced by any business is the hassle of scaling the resources. In the case of the on-premise communication system, expansion is coupled with purchasing additional computing resources, staff and space to place all these resources.

However, with the cloud system, the process of scaling becomes effortless. To scale up or scale down the resources, one needs to state the requirement and ask their service provider to allocate or remove the additional resources over the cloud. As the service provider is equipped with enough resources, the scaling process becomes quick. Moreover, it does not demand you to buy additional space and staff which significantly lowers the scaling cost.

4. Business Continuity

Server failure, network issues, and other technical problems can put the whole business to screeching halt. On-premise systems often encounter these uninvited issues and face a lot of trouble to return to normalcy. Crunch of backup resources is the primary reason behind this lag. Due to heavy infrastructure and cost involved, it is practically impossible for businesses to keep additional resources available at their disposal.

This critical issue, however, is easily tackled with cloud telephony. Cloud service providers are equipped with strong disaster recovery plans to handle any such unforeseen situations. Multiple servers placed in different geographical locations are constantly backing up the data from the running server. In case of any disaster or network failures, these redundant servers are made up and running for use. This ensures that no critical data is lost, and business operations are functioning smoothly.

5. Remote Working

Going by the research, 70% of organisations will adopt a remote style of working by 2020. With this rising trend, it has become imperative for businesses to provide employees with remote connectivity. However, remote working becomes a challenge for the on-premise system. Its static nature restricts the business to provide remote connectivity to their agents.

However, cloud telephony proves to be a great solution to this problem. As the communication system is hosted on the cloud, any agent can access the service through the internet. The agent simply needs to have access to the web portal provided by the service provider. Moreover, with the call transferring feature provided in the cloud telephony suite, a business can easily route the business calls to their personal number which gives them the flexibility to handle the calls even on the go.

6. Quick Data Retrieval & Analysis

Working on an on-premise system is a complication when it comes to accessing call data records. Keeping track of all the customer calls and extracting the data for any business analysis is near to impossible task. While, on the other hand, with cloud telephony, the tracking process not only becomes easy, but the efficiency of the whole process gets maximised with call analytics dashboards.

These dashboards and reports provide an in-depth analysis of the important call centre KPIs such as no. of active, missed, and unanswered calls. Additionally, metrics providing insight into agent’s performance are also present on the dashboard. Call centre managers can easily customise these reports and schedule it on the team member’s email ID to avoid manual tracking of the calls every day.