Cloud Telephony

Telephony has always been an important marketing strategy and support  tool in all the businesses. PBX and intercom are the few examples of it. Along with the technology evolution, the telephony techniques in the business have also improved and the call center software came into existence. Call center software's are the telephony setups, where calls land, queued up and distributed to the persons called customer support executives.

How the Call-Centers work?

• Any service provider, who wants to take their users  queries and wants to support them  purchases  a Toll-Free number or any  virtual number from the operator.
• A server setup is done at service provider's premise or in some datacenter facility.
• To take the calls on this server , PRI /SIP connectivity is taken from telecom operator.
• All calls on the virtual number/ Toll-Free number are routed to the server.
• The server is deployed with call answering software, it  answers the calls and  distributes them according to the  predefined skillset of executives. 
• Customer care executives are provided with the computers or IP phones  to take the calls  and provide the required information to callers. 

Pros and Cons of Call center setups 

 Pros:-

1. Organization has the ownership on the entire setup viz. hardware , software, PRI line/SIP Trunk,  Software Licenses etc.
2. If any fault arises then they may initiate a troubleshooting on the immediate basis.
3. Data and all transactions take place on in the private network and thus ensures high security.

Cons:-

1. Technical expertise is required to do the entire setup.
2. Space required for deployment. it could be on organization premises or in some datacenter, which has associated cost with it.
3. Hardware servers, PRI, etc  has huge upfront cost and  periodic recurring cost.
4. Telephony software which takes the calls is licensed by some solution providers like CISCO , Avaya etc. Its has also one time or recurring license cost.
5. For the maintenance purpose, an IT professional is required on 24/7 basis to cope with  any fault at runtime.
6. Since the entire setup is done at organization's premises or at some data center which is situated far  away from the solution  provider and thus in case of major failure it will take time for them to reach the site and get it repaired.
7. Along with the time technology gets outdated, thus infrastructure upgrade  for adopting new technology will result in extra cost after some time.
8. all the executives should have either computer or IP phone to take calls, they require some sitting arrangement to carry out their operational work.
9. Because of huge Capex and Opex, only big businesses and enterprises can  afford such kind of setups.
10. Different resources required for infrastructure and for this entire setup, are catered by different providers and thus there exist multiple channels of procurement and communication. 

What is Cloud Telephony?

Cloud Telephony is all about to deploy a huge telephony infrastructure at the cloud i.e. basically some good datacenter facility where  basic requirements like power backup, internet bandwidth etc. are available with maximum up time. This infrastructure will consist following as part of it :

• High speed and high-performance servers with load balancing and redundancy.
• PRI lines  and SIP trunk lines  to  route the user calls from telco to the server and Vice versa.
• Huge storage space to store user data, like calls transactional data and recordings etc.
• Firewall to keep the servers and software  secure from hackers and other intrusions.

Along with the above infrastructure, Cloud telephony service provider maintains an inventory of virtual number, Toll-free number and landline numbers.The user can choose any of the virtual number  of choice amongst these.Cloud Telephony service provider has an expert team at the backend to ensure smooth functioning of services over the cloud. 

To whom Cloud Telephony will benefit?

Cloud Telephony solutions are best suited for small and medium  enterprises and businesses.beow are some of the reasons Cloud Telephony services are best suited to SME and SMBs.

1. They need not to, do any infrastructure setup.
2. Their need is very small like  2/3/4/  channels so they can't do a huge setup for this.
3. They don't have technical expertise, they want someone to take care of everything for them.
4. They don't have call center type setup where  executives sit and take calls, most of their  employee are moving and takes calls on mobile.
5. They don't have any mechanism to observe if their workers are taking all the calls  and communicate well with callers.
6. Worker's contact number's keep on changing, thus if their numbers are promoted directly then users will lose the trust, whenever the mobile number changes. 
7. Sometimes  workers/employees are on the other call and miss the call, hence an opportunity loss.
8. Three is no way to get in touch with the missed calls.
9. All of the services  like, virtual number, channels required and user interface, are available for them under the single roof so they need not to contact different vendors to make their setup working.

Key Services under Cloud Telephony

1. TollFree number, virtual number along with IVR and call routing to multiple agents. Routing could be sequential, round robin, parallel ring etc.   
2. Click to call
3. Outdial promotional campaign
4. Fax service
5. Conference call

Major Cloud Telephony Providers

• Minavo Telecom
• My Operator
• Knowlarity
• Exotel