The advantage of cloud telephony

Recently, my Internet was not working for a few days and when I called my service provider, they sent an engineer over after 2 days of constant follow-ups. When this engineer came over, I told him how frustrating it was to be passed around by the call center folks without getting any proper response. He promptly gave me his mobile phone number and asked me to call him directly the next time as he was the area sales engineer and the calls get diverted to him anyway.

And that’s exactly what I did the next time I had an issue. This is a potential customer conversation that is going untracked and unmeasured. There is no way to figure out how many folks are calling the sales engineer directly, is he sticking to the promised turn around time, is he missing calls and are customers getting frustrated as a result?

Cloud telephony can potentially help you track, measure and analyze even these calls. Cloud telephony can even bring in typical call center features like call barging, whispering, etc, put these calls on a dashboard, give a supervisor or manager access to a field agent’s call, use call recordings for dispute resolution and what not.

Cloud telephony is built to make the customer interaction experience far superior. And this is made possible because, just like your phone system, your CRM/ERP, Helpdesk software etc have also moved to the cloud. And the interaction between all of these ensures that your agents have all the information they possibly need to help your customers out.

Cloud telephony is also tailor-made for listing services due the level of tracking and analysis that is possible. When businesses use cloud telephony, a restaurant listing website is now able to figure out exactly how many people made a reservation after browsing through their website. And the restaurant is able to understand exactly how their customers are finding out about them.

So, what happens to that PBX system that businesses traditionally had in their offices? Does it now become obsolete? The traditional PBX system is just like a telephone exchange. It allows for 2 people to seamlessly connect and talk. Like a landline phone. You make or receive a call, have a chat and hang up. It works when you have no bigger purpose to the call than having a chat. But think about it in the context of a customer interaction.

When you call a customer support number, your intentions are far from just having a casual chat. In all possibility, you’re irritated. You want someone to hear you out, solve your problem and if they can’t solve your problem, escalate it to someone who can and then give you closure.

To sum up, when the PBX system moves to the cloud, new possibilities open up. Cloud telephony is the best fit for businesses that want to track, measure, monitor and analyze all of their business phone interactions.