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Business News/ Opinion / Online-views/  Imagine a world without cloud telephony
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Imagine a world without cloud telephony

You might never get to see how cloud telephony works (it's that seamless) but it's there, behind the scenes

Photo: iStockPremium
Photo: iStock

A tremendous tech boom has taken place over the last few years. We aren’t talking about social media, which is big enough, but something which has an even greater impact on making your everyday life a lot easier. We’re talking about cloud computing, and more specifically, cloud telephony.

In a nutshell, cloud telephony harnesses the power of cloud computing—using powerful cloud servers from providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc., and Microsoft Corp.—to provide a seamless, affordable, easy-to-manage and unified communications system for individuals, professionals, and businesses alike.

From banks to taxi services, cloud telephony is everywhere. Called your bank and got routed to an available support executive without much fuss? That’s cloud telephony. Booked a cab and then decided to call the driver right from the app? That’s cloud telephony. For more information on a new insurance product, entered your phone number on the web and got a call back within a few minutes? That’s... exactly.

Banks, app-based cab services, airlines, online retailers—everyone uses cloud telephony to give customers instant, hassle-free, high-quality support and information that wasn’t possible earlier.

Moreover, cloud telephony is accessible to businesses of all sizes; that’s why even small start-ups like the one you’re working on, can set up a call centre instantly, to keep customers happy right from the get-go.

The affordability and scalability of cloud telephony is what makes all of this possible. The ease with which this technology grows along with a business makes it a no-brainer of a choice. No longer does your favourite online fashion store have to set up an expensive call centre that requires heavy investment and years of planning.

Cloud telephony can easily be adapted and tweaked to the needs of a business. This way, your favourite brands save a lot of money (a benefit which eventually gets passed on to you, the customer) and at the same time are able to provide better service.

Name a brand, and it’s a near guarantee it uses cloud telephony to stay in touch with its customers. Even schools and hospitals do so, making this new technology such a vital part of our day-to-day lives that it’s hard imagining a time when it wasn’t so prevalent.

Better service is easy when businesses use cloud telephony.

For businesses, cloud telephony is a vital tool that enables them to take care of customers in a way that wasn’t possible earlier. But as a customer, what do you get? Plenty. Like we mentioned above, businesses of all sizes and types use cloud telephony to improve customer service.

Professionals use it to coordinate with clients the world over, start-ups and small businesses use it to give the customer a level of service you’d only expect from a large corporation, and even large corporations use cloud telephony to offer a personalised level of service that keeps customers satisfied.

What happens without cloud telephony?

In one line? We go back a decade, to levels of customer service that were mediocre at best. As the costs of providing telephone support shoot up, we’ll see longer wait times and more annoying mix-ups that force you to call again and again, while 24x7 service levels we’re used to might disappear, toll-free and free customer support might be available only for the deep-pocketed.

The bigger corporations might still be able to adapt (but they’ll probably charge the customer more when they have to invest tens of millions in new call centres), but the small and medium businesses won’t—in fact, the start-up boom that’s happening around us might get hit really bad, as only big companies with plenty of cash will be able to provide good service.

Cloud telephony has revolutionized businesses, especially in the B2C (business to consumer) sector, and for this reason, it’s hard to conceive a world where cloud telephony doesn’t exist. You might never get to see how it works (it’s that seamless) but it’s there, behind the scenes, making it possible for all of us to spend our time not on ‘getting stuff done’ but on ‘getting the stuff that matters’ done.

Saurabh Dayal is head (growth) for India at cloud telephony firm Knowlarity.

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Published: 19 Aug 2016, 12:56 AM IST
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