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.