Top Telephony trends in India

Telephony in general has either been the front runner or has been keeping pace with all the technological developments that are taking place around us. India has been no exception to this. Some may argue that the average Internet surfing speeds in India are way slower than the nations like Korea or Japan within Asia but this is also the fact that if any sector in India that has seen the rapid growth and the technological catch up, it is telecom sector. We have come far ahead from where we started 20 years back post the privatization and liberalization of this sector. However, this article is not about the past but about looking at the future. In this article, I am sharing with you my views on what are the top trends in telephony and what are the technologies that are past their prime and losing market share

OTT applications or Over the Top applications (↑)

Applications like Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, Tango, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat and Hike are a new norm. Nowadays people prefer to use WhatsApp and other IM services to communicate. Newly launched voice calls on WhatsApp, Skype, Viber and other OTT voice applications are definitely making an impact on telco revenues and taking away a decent chunk of voice revenue. Better Internet bandwidth availability is going to further spring up the usage of these apps.

Cloud Telephony and UC (↑)

The benefits like increased flexibility, unified communication platforms, process integration, RoI monitoring and decreased costs are encouraging businesses to abandon their on premise PBX systems and switch to the hosted PBX and UC (unified communications) systems. Cloud-based solutions and services will continue to grow in the future and more companies will migrate their communications systems to the cloud. This demand will further accelerate with better bandwidth access to the retail customers, opening up of VoIP for business along-with the improvement in Enterprise networks.

Mobile (↑)

Mobile usage in India has been growing at an average of around 8 to 13% per annum in last 3 years across various states and will continue to grow in double digits going ahead. There might be a dip in growth of voice usage with the advent and penetration of OTT services but the growth in internet consumption will drive the mobile usage upwards. 60% of Internet users in India now access internet thru mobile and 80% of new internet users are accessing Internet through mobile. What is driving and will further drive growth is the rapidly increasing smartphone penetration in India. With most of the companies rolling out 4G networks, the smartphone penetration will only see further jump and give rise to many new use cases.

WebRTC (↑)

WebRTC stands for web real-time communications. It is the emerging industry standard that allows you to use the web browser for services like voice calling, video chat, and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing without the need of external plugins. WebRTC is supported by all major web browsers (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera) and the number of unified communication vendors and business software developers are adding WebRTC to their products which influence the demand for this technology, especially among the enterprise market.

Payphones and Calling Cards (↓)

With the increased penetration of mobile phones (80% tele-density in India), the usage of calling cards and the number of visitors in payphone shops is consistently declining. With further decline in prices of mobile phones in secondary and reuse markets and increased penetration of OTT services, this will further decline.

Fixed Line Telephones (↓)

Fixed line telephone subscribers are continuously decreasing due to the increase of mobile device penetration. Improved internet bandwidth, faster access and easy deployment of mobile networks, mobiles are a more convenient alternative to the fixed line. With further launch of 4G the fixed line subscriptions are only going to decline. There isn't much hope as well unless companies re-advent and look to deploy triple play aggressively to save fixed line subscriptions. The cost too will play an important role here, both for operators as well as end consumers.

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Why organisations in India are moving from traditional PBX to Cloud Telephony

Cloud Telephony in India is seeing a rapid growth thanks to the adoption of this technology by SMEs and new age startups. The rapid surge of E-Commerce companies in India has led to the faster adoption of the cloud as an overall platform for technology and more so in telephony space. Many of the new and upcoming E-Commerce companies are choosing to use cloud telephony for their communication needs and call management systems. As we see the key drivers of this adoption are following inherent advantages that cloud telephony has over traditional PBX systems:

Affordability:

The most important aspect of cloud telephony is that it provides the enterprise class PBX and communication features and services even to the start-up organisations at a very low initial investment. Added to that is its hassle free maintenance as the customer doesn’t have any expensive physical hardware to maintain and is protected from obsolescence. The entire system is hosted on cloud and thus saves the organisation from getting maintenance, training etc. of the physical equipment

Scalability and Portability:

Another aspect that catches fancy of the organisations both large as well as small organisations is its scalability. The system can be upgraded and enhanced as the size of the organisation grows. You do not have to invest into the system that you may require 5 years down the line and by the time it starts operating at its optimum capacity, the system goes obsolete. As the system is hosted the relocation of office premises is also hassle free and smooth.

Customisation:

As it is hosted on cloud, the customization is very easy. The end user can define the call flows as per his process flow and not the other way round where the customer customizes its process flow as per the call flow pre – defined in the system and then change the process as and when the change of system is required. The call flow set-up process is also very simple and can be done with a click of the mouse.

CRM and ERP Integration:

Its integration with the other hosted CRM applications like Salesforce, Zoho etc. makes it a real powerful tool in helping improve the employee productivity.

24*7 customer contact:

Cloud telephony’s smart features allow organisations to be always in touch with your customers. Its features allow you track all your calls even your missed calls and the inbuilt voice mail services allow the callers to leave a message in-case the person is not able to receive the call.

Projects a professional image:

Every number that you use for your business has a corporate image for a product or service associated with it. The greeting message to a caller, the automated response system and the intelligent call routing are some aspects that project a professional image of the organisation and reinforce that identity to the brand / product / service.

 

Given these advantages, some of the key applications that are driving the usage of cloud telephony amongst the organisations are:

Unified communication:

Cloud telephony integrates all channels of communication on a single platform and makes it easier for the organisations and their employees to communicate with their clients. The single platform allows using sms, email or the voice call to communicate with the clients and internally thereby eliminating any lags in communication. Some of the large organisations are using it for their internal communications as well.

Insights:

As all calls are tracked and recorded, the features of cloud telephony provides you geo based and category-wise insights on your product or service penetration basis the number of calls from each territory and the call duration of each call. As each call is recorded:

·         The same recordings are being used to design the training programs for the call handling agents.

·         Customer feedback is used for future product design and

·         Altering the communication message.

RoI tracking:

Every organisation spends a lot on its marketing campaigns to draw attention of their prospective clients to its products or services. In order to achieve this goal, they use multiple channels to communicate their message to the end customer. It is important for every organisation to track the effectiveness / RoI of each of these channels. Organisations are using Virtual Calling numbers to track the RoI of each of their channels across category and geography to enable organisations to alter their marketing campaigns as per their goals. This is not only saving them huge costs but also helping them design their campaigns better to be more effective.

Multi-Channel Marketing:

Organisations are using cloud telephony to send bulk SMS, Bulk emails or Bulk voice calls through a common platform. Toll free numbers are integrated through Interactive voice response system to generate instant response to the marketing campaign and are very effective as there is no cost to the clients on the calls made on toll free.

Monitors Employee productivity:

Cloud telephony can be integrated with hosted CRM and ERP applications. This is enabling organisations to monitor their employee productivity and take corrective actions accordingly.

Process Automation:

Features like CTI Integration are allowing organisations to automate their ticketing process on interactive voice platform.

There are many operators in India that are offering Cloud telephony services and with the current boom of SMEs and new age start-ups the need to adopt modern and new age technologies will only go up. The question is no more about should we or not, but is about when? Sooner the better.

Cloud Telephony for Real Estate

Cloud Telephony today is transforming the way organisations look at their telecom set –ups and making them realize the vast potential of telecom as a resource to improve their business productivity. It is also changing the way organisations manage their communication with their prospective customers. Zero initial cost on the expensive hardware, call flow customization, call tracking, and its ability to integrate with most of the popular web based applications like CRM, ticketing systems etc are some of the reasons why more and more organisations are adopting cloud telephony and more so the Real Estate companies.

Quoting one of the Industry veterans from Real Estate industry, the times have changed and selling a flat is no more the same as it used to be couple of years back when you could just blast the media with your ad campaign and people would come queuing up to  grab the offer. Real Estate is no more the same and has to be looked at from the perspective of an investment opportunity and needs to be marketed accordingly in competition with the other investment instruments available in the market. The customer of Digital age is more informed about the market trends and the returns on investment across investment opportunities and thus there is a need for far better communication methods and better informed sales teams to follow them up. Looking at these challenges, I am highlighting some of the benefits of choosing cloud telephony and hos these can be leveraged to improve the business productivity:

Make impact with voice.

Campaigning is how organisations engage with their end customers. Emails apart from media campaigns have been the primary way for a long time now, but the impact is severely limited with most email services like Gmail introducing automatic filtering. On the contrary, voice/sms campaigning is far more effective, and ensures higher conversion. For example, recently, an Indian political party ran a massive voice campaign urging voters to come out and vote – needless to say, the party won by a landslide majority and was acknowledged worldwide for its innovative campaigning.

Measure outreach more effectively

Cloud telephony platforms, offer detailed analytics on the call data such as region-wise split, customer wise split or even summary of results. These analytics can be customized or integrated with any existing reporting system as well.

Engage with your customers

Sales are largely a conversion business. Organisations run campaigns to generate leads that further translate into the business depending on how effective your follow up is to the initial communication with the customer. In order to generate more business, either you increase the leads or improve the productivity of your sales teams. In today’s environment, when the customers are far to come by (lower leads), organisations need to look at the strategies and take help of technology to improve the productivity of their people and convert every lead into a Gold. Cloud telephony platforms can completely change the way your support teams can engage with their customers. Integrations with CRM, or ticketing systems, where every call automatically gets recorded and becomes a support ticket assigned to a team member, you get greater visibility and can track each and every lead independently. Analysis of Call recordings can help design training programs for your teams to be more effective.

Better ROI of your campaign

Real Estate companies spend a large amount of monies on the media campaigns across various channels without realizing the effective ROIs of each of these channels. Cloud telephony platforms thru their virtual numbers ensure that you get to know the no of leads that you are able to generate from each of these channels on a real time basis. Integration with your CRM helps you track the conversions of these leads and gives you the RoI across channels on Real time basis. This enables you to make better decision regarding your campaigns on how much to spend on what channels and the messaging to generate better RoIs.


These are just a few of the applications that I have highlighted as the potential is immense. You can automate your site visit scheduling, payment related information, site progress updates apart from some of the applications listed above.

Modern telephone systems - Key to operational efficiency

There has not been much innovation in telephony since the VOIP revolution, but every telephone service provider is still claiming to have the best quality at the cheapest rate. With all this competition in the market, what is the real differentiator in today's highly competitive telephony environment?

As legacy PBX systems continue to die off, companies are making a conscious effort to wade through the confusion and figure out what can benefit them most in a cost-effective manner.

Business telephony is a commodity, with standard features like call forwarding, call back, call waiting, caller ID, call hunting, least cost routing, interactive voice response and teleconferencing. The question is, what makes one telephone system better than another

Local product and support

A key consideration when choosing a telephony solution is proprietary software that is locally developed, it allows the vendor to have maximum control over development direction and features.

Innovation

Innovation is the strongest differentiator. All providers push PBX functionality but the truth is, PBX functionality is literally a commodity that has been available since the 1970s. It's not new or innovative, true business telephony innovation lies in three areas – control; integration; and management and cost reporting."

Control

Use technology to do the work and create beautiful easy-to-understand user interfaces that empower customers. Would you use a bank that does not offer Internet banking? Of course not. The reason is, it is disempowering and forces you to rely on outside assistance.

Additionally, technology must enable businesses to control their telephone system –  simply and easily. Management should have the ability to quickly and effectively see cost reporting across the organisation. It empowers businesses to take control of communication costs without a heavy administration burden.

Management reporting

Cloud based systems offer its customers full control and reporting over their telephone system. An easy-to-use Web interface allows them to configure the system to their specific requirement. The automation functionality of the cloud-based system means lower costs and higher efficiencies, while giving business owners direct access and agility to respond to changing demands.

User extension reports allow managers to view activity and productivity of users on the phone. It enables accountability, workforce management and provides insight into customer and sales communications and businesses.

Companies can now assess their call costs and determine exactly which users and departments are costing them the most.

With Cloud based systems one is now able to manage PBX's high level functions and also one's day-to-day operations from anywhere and at no extra cost. Detailed reports, real-time monitoring, call tracking, and trend data etc.

Integration and automation

By automating and also integrating your cloud telephone system with a CRM system in the cloud, executives can now have activity tracking combined with call tracking and recording at their fingertips. Enterprise class business cloud services remove complexities, automate processes and simplify everything. This allows businesses to focus on their core service offering instead of their IT infrastructure.

An innovative cloud PBX is the ideal solution for existing and emerging workforces who demand constant connectivity and productivity from anywhere – any time. No more unnecessary long-term contracts, high call costs and opaque billing.

A cloud-based telephone management system that will help company executives manage, control and analyse every element of their telephone system with precision. It provides all the communication features needed to keep businesses operationally efficient, no matter where or when."

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Migrating Telecommunications to the Cloud

The average lifespan of an on-premise PBX system around 6.5 years. However, given the high cost of upgrading or replacing a PBX system many companies are stuck with outdated telephony systems that cannot provide the capability or functionality required in today’s fast-moving communications landscape. That is why a growing number of SMBs are looking at cloud platforms to meet their changing telecommunication needs. Migrating communications to the cloud can provide companies with the agility, flexibility and mobility that is needed to compete in an increasingly competitive environment. But, there are following clear benefits that a cloud telephony offers that SMBs cannot simply risk to ignore:

Unified communications

According to Transparency Market Research, the global Unified Communications (UC) market is expected to reach nearly $62 billion by 2018, representing 12 per cent year-over-year growth between now and then. A typical SMB with an on-premise PBX is likely to have accumulated a mish-mash of business communications tools over time, resulting in disparate and disconnected systems for desktop phones, mobile workers, web conferencing, video and audio conferencing, and so on, resulting in multiple management and billing headaches.

Migrating communications to the cloud can provide SMBs with access to a complete unified communications solution, including voice, video, collaboration, SMS, email, and so on, that otherwise would be financially out of their reach.

Access to latest features

Moving to the cloud provides SMBs with the latest, state-of-the-art communications solutions without the significant upfront investment required for on-premise solutions. Older PBX systems will have a limited feature set, compared to today’s cloud-based offerings. Furthermore, latest features and capabilities, such as new UC tools, CRM integration etc. can be integrated immediately into the platform without the need to perform any form of system upgrade.

Eliminate costs and management headaches

The cost of upgrading or replacing an outdated on-premise PBX system is prohibitive for many SMBs, especially those with multiple locations. A cloud solution eliminates the need for costly upfront investment and on-going management and maintenance costs such as infrastructure, hardware, wiring, and so on.

Analytics and Business Productivity

The host of features that latest communication tools offer on hosted Unified Communication enable you get relevant real time information in the form of dashboard that can be acted upon. Using these tools organizations can track the ROIs of their communication costs as well track ROIs of  their marketing campaigns in real time. This not only enables the companies to spend monies more prudently but also rationalize their communications.

Scalability and flexibility

The beauty of a hosted communications is that features and capabilities can be added or removed, virtually at the click of a button, allowing SMBs to respond rapidly to peaks and troughs in demand, or to changes in the competitive landscape. Scalability and flexibility are the hallmark of a hosted solution, allowing SMBs to concentrate on the business objectives, rather than on technology concerns.

Mobility

According to Gartner, by 2017 more than half of all employees will expect their employer to offer mobile devices in order for them to perform their tasks effectively and productively. Furthermore, survey after survey shows that employees would leave their existing employer for another, if the later offered better flexible working options.

Big Dinosaur telcos failing SMEs

Most of the Small and Medium businesses today are losing out on the host of commercial benefits brought about by the smarter and more intelligent cloud based telephone systems. These companies waste hours of time and rupees on their old style telephone systems as most of the large operators fail to upgrade their systems with the changing times.

The telephony solutions today are no meager handsets and expense heads that are to be there. They are rather an important part of resources that the organisations have to improve their business productivity. The cloud telephony systems of today offer the rich gamut of features that are smart and intelligent and help organisations improve their resource allocation and spend the money where the returns are better.

These systems also integrate smoothly with the existing IT setup of the organisations. They provide the enterprise grade telecom system to the startups, SMEs and Medium Enterprises without having to worry about capital expenditures on such advanced systems. There is a growth in the traction for cloud-based unified communication and collaboration among large enterprises as well because of its inherent benefits such as cost reduction, improved scalability, and enhanced efficiency

Improvements in communications bandwidth, rise of third-platform services, and increased need for collaboration are the major drivers, especially for developed economies. Major technological developments such as VoIP, VoLTE and session initiation protocol have enhanced the customer experience by providing improvement in quality of service.

Technavio's analysts forecast the global Unified Communications services market to grow at a CAGR of approx. 12% over the period 2014-2019.