Companies have been moving from on-premises solutions to superior cloud-based services for years, and it’s only going to continue. Whether your organization was an early adopter or has taken more of a cautious ‘wait and see’ approach, moving your communications to the cloud is a great next step. While companies are already realizing substantial benefits from unified communications solutions like Microsoft Teams and Cisco Webex (including employee chat and messaging, video conferencing, and file sharing) there are many, many more benefits you’ll realize by integrating enterprise telephony into those tools. In short, they’re missing the benefits of cloud voice.
Is your company missing out? Here are five great benefits to adding voice to your collaboration solution:
- Improved employee collaboration
Integrating cloud voice creates a truly unified communications and collaboration platform. It enables employees to place a voice call from the same user interface that they are already using to chat, meet, or share files with colleagues. In principle, all of the tools that an employee uses on a daily basis work seamlessly together. Employees don’t waste time jumping from one system to another.
In addition, an integrated voice and collaboration suite delivers consistent user experiences across the variety of devices that employees are using to connect to the collaboration suite.
- ROI through Employee Productivity
A recent Forrester study suggests that workers can save 30 minutes per day by having better access to voice calling through a collaboration solution. These seemingly small time savings quickly add up and can make a big difference in team productivity, especially when a company has hundreds or thousands of employees. In fact, the Forrester study estimated the average company of 5,000 employees could save more than $2 million a year with this increase in productivity alone.
In addition, easier connections to external customers and partners can also help increase sales, reduce a product’s time-to-market, and improve company decision making processes and outcomes.
- Infrastructure Cost Savings
Not only do cloud voice services save time and increase the ease of business, they also can significantly reduce technology infrastructure costs.
With cloud voice, companies can replace on-premises telecommunications equipment that’s expensive to purchase and maintain. This includes the backend equipment, and the plethora of desktop phones that must be installed and set up every time a company hires a new employee. In addition to the hardware savings, companies can also reduce their investment in employees required to manage this equipment.
Finally, cloud voice services – using IP-based calls – can also significantly reduce a company’s international mobile roaming and long-distance bills.
- Full Feature Set
Cloud voice services include a wide range of features including visual voicemail, call delegation, presence status, call blocking, and click-to-call. These features enable the employee to customize their soft phone experience to their needs and situation. Just as important, these features are presented in a user interface that makes them much easier for employees to learn and use than on typical land lines.
- Contact Center Capabilities
Finally, adding cloud voice to your collaboration platform enables you to enhance customer experience with a cloud-based contact center. With this critical add-on, a customer looking for support can contact the company through their channel of choice, whether it be a phone call, a text message, an email or through chat. These contact centers offer intelligent features, with calls routing based on availability, skill set or other factors.
Final thoughts
When you consider the benefits of integrating cloud voice in your unified communication tools — from increased productivity and collaboration to significant cost savings and feature-rich services that benefit your customers and internal teams — there’s no better time to move your telephony to the cloud. Find a cloud communications partner with a rich history of telephony expertise, support experience, and start taking advantage of everything cloud voice has to offer.
Source: CIO
