Why now is the time to move your business to hosted telephony
Now, more than ever, is the time to move your business to hosted telephony. As technology has progressed, the business case has become more and more compelling. Let’s dive into why now is the time to make the move.
Competition
If your nearest competitor upgraded their internet and could function faster, more reliably and more securely, they would regularly be winning business from you. This applies across the board, and not just in technology. Technology, in particular, is one area where you don’t need to be lacking behind competitors for long.
Keeping up
Migrating to hosted telephony is no longer the lengthy process it once was. Moving from your old on-premises phone system to a feature rich, scalable solution doesn’t take long at all.
It could be as simple as hearing the new self-service queue on your competitors' main line. If customers calling no longer need to wait to get an answer to their query, or make a purchase, they are likely to use that service again.
They will no longer hang up after waiting five minutes and call another business.. The implementation of a simple auto attendant can drive self-service and route customers through to the right part of the business first time. First call resolution is crucial in both winning and retaining business.
Getting ahead
Once you’ve installed and got to grips with your hosted telephony solution, you have enabled your business to change as technology progresses. When the technology stack of cloud communications transitions into collaboration, customer experience or wherever it may go, so will your business.
Hosted telephony is totally future proof. We’ve already seen innovations such as Unified Comms form a natural extension of hosted telephony. From calling and voice communications, hosted telephony now let's your business explore instant messaging and virtual meetings.
The power of these tools should not be underestimated. These productivity features can transform a business from market leading to market dominating through simple adoption of widely available features. If you can utilise communications technology better than anybody else, your entire business will function better than any other.
Changes In Technology
As technology changes for the better, your business has an opportunity to get ahead. Not only can you transform your business through the use of better communications technology, you can attract better talent and make your existing investments work harder.
Attract The Best Talent
Consumer technology is at it’s peak. From smart phones to wearables to IoT devices in the home, the tech savvy of today are more connected and more empowered. Communicating and collaborating outside of work is easier. In your pocket, you have any number of mediums to contact a friend or family member. This type of user fully expects your business to be on par with their pocket – as a minimum.
When looking for a new job, the job seeker of today is not just looking for any job. They are looking for the job. The job where they can make the biggest impact, earn the most money and be trusted to do things the way they know works. This ranges from coffee machine to laptop to telephone. A telephone simply must do more than make calls. It is the hub of day to day life therefore it must be the hub of day to day work.
Anything less and your potential or current staff will find a more suitable company elsewhere.
Less Isn’t More
Running a business, or even running a department, comes with bespoke requirements for applications. Identifying the most used business apps is crucial for business improvement. Improving them with subtle integrations and add-ons is even more important. By leveraging functionality through hosted telephony, your business apps can deliver a higher return on investment and enhance productivity.
Whether your business revolves around Salesforce, Office 365 or Dynamics, the integration possibilities via hosted telephony are vast. With a simple telephony integration, you can add click to dial, contact popping and activity logging to your core applications. Not only will this improve productivity when in these apps, but your original investment becomes more tangible.
Keeping your applications in silos allows you to get the most of that one application. Combining your applications with your hosted telephony estate make your business apps work harder and constantly push productivity limits.
Leaking Money
The longer you delay moving your on-premises phone system to the cloud, the more your business is leaking money. From running what you thought was already paid for to doing things the long way around, there is a lot of money to be saved by moving to hosted telephony.
Hidden costs
When purchasing the initial on-premises PBX, it’s easy to assume that everything has been paid for. But, budgeting for running costs still needs to be factored into your business plan.
It’s not a case of feet up and wait for the next phone system to be installed. Ongoing charges of an on-premises are made up of several factors. We recently posted a blog, “Is Your On-Premises Phone System Costing You More Than You Think?” In this post, we cover themes such as phone line rental, monthly maintenance, ongoing repairs and call outs, expensive call charges and downtime when the system goes down.
The combination of these costs paints a different picture to your original PBX assumption.
Productivity
With demand and pressure for work done better and quicker than ever before, it is crucial that your business is fulfilling work at optimum performance. It's easy to ignore the time and cost associated with unproductive work as you can’t see it. However, the results at the end of the quarter, or the reflection in your CSAT and Net Promotor Score are paramount to business improvement and customer retention.
Rather than assume your communications technology is fit for purpose, then find out later that it’s costing you in time, effort and resource, hosted telephony opens the door to a more productive and cost-effective workforce.
If you want to stay ahead of competition, attract better talent and suppress hidden productivity loss, hosted telephony is critical. To understand how best to plan for these factors, and to learn more about moving to the cloud, check out the next blog in the series where we look at installation requirements to best prepare your business when moving to hosted telephony.
If you would like to find out more, then you may like to read one of our other blogs or downloads, or request a conversation with one of our consultants. We are always happy to discuss, without obligation.