Insider tips on selecting the right cloud telephony
Anita Raghav
Nov 1, 2023 | 5 mins read
Cloud telephony offers unmatched features, scalability, and cost-effectiveness compared to PBX systems, business phones, or legacy contact centers. But selecting the right cloud telephony solution isn’t easy.
This article provides “insider” tips on how to selc the right cloud telephony solution. If you are a newbie to cloud telephony, you’ll build knowledge on what can go wrong with your contact center solution. (and why). While, experienced contact center users/managers will finally understand why they are facing problems with the cloud communication platform they’ve chosen.
Prashanth Kancherla, VP, International Business, Ozonetel, has been part of the cloud telephony revolution since its inception. We asked him to draw on his vast experience to build this article. He spent days deeply researching problems and complaints that competitors’ customers have faced over the years, before compiling this article for us. Read his breakdown:
Voice Quality is often an issue.
Voice quality issues arise due to two reasons:
Reason 1: Does your cloud telephony provider have a point of presence in more than one continent? in this case, you need to know where all your cloud telephony provider has a POP. Most big players run from a central location in the US. This results in high latency to clients whose agents are sitting far away from their data center. End result? Poor voice quality.
We have points of presence (POP) across all continents spanning from the US(Americas), UK( For Europe), Dubai ( Middle East), Singapore ( South East Asia), and Australia. Agents are connected to the nearest possible POP for the highest voice quality.
Reason 2: For most cloud providers, voice is embedded in their application. At Ozonetel, we treat voice and web (data) separately. This reduces packet loss and improves quality.
Billing may not be that straightforward.
One thing people don’t investigate while choosing their software is billing. You need to be sure that your cloud telephony provider gives you transparency. At Ozonetel, we don’t just provide transparent billing—we also bundle insufficient free minutes with every agent license. So you have a fixed cost per month and the outflow(phone billing) is the only variable you need to look at day-to-day.
We also offer clients to get their own telephony trunks ( Enterprise clients, we care for you too!), so you pay the call charges to the operator and pay us for only our Cloud Contact Center software.
Poor customer service
We read a lot of customer reviews on G2 crowd that talk about slow customer responses from their telephony vendor. When you purchase a cloud telephony system, you need to know that you will be contacting your vendor often. You may need to try a new integration, or you may face an outage, or there may be some very simple issue that needs fixing. You will need a prompt response, or your business will suffer.
We pride ourselves on responsive customer support. Our 24*7 support team has won lots of kudos from all our clients.
Slow systems.
Customers often don’t realize what’s causing the lag in their APIs. A lot of cloud contact centers depend on third party platforms for their core telephony. That is, they are built on third-party CPaaS (cloud platform as a solution). Many of these CPaas platforms haven’t even been architected for a contact center–hey were built primarily for simple IVR applications. KOOKOO is one of the few cloud telephony/contact center providers that own the entire stack. We do not depend on any 3rd party CPaaS for running our product. In fact, I can safely say we are the ONLY firm that owns both the CPaaS platform and the contact center product. Plus, our platform has been architected from day one to handle contact center needs which is delay-sensitive in nature.
Data privacy
Sooner or later, you will need to integrate your cloud telephony and CRM or ticketing system. This will give you multiple benefits for your support and sales functions like improved personalization, reduced agent work, and many more. However, when other cloud telephony providers integrate, they often store a copy of your CRM /Ticketing database on their systems. As a policy, Ozonetel never stores any of this third party client data.
Power dialers within your CRM
While many telephony providers can give a click to call functionality within your CRM or ticketing software; very few provide automated or power dialers. These dialers can improve productivity by at least 18x times. That’s why we ensure that our clients can choose from progressive, predictive, or preview dialers that they can use seamlessly with their CRM integration be it Zoho, Zendesk, Salesforce, or Hubspot.
Reporting & analytics
Reporting is one of the key benefits of cloud contact center solutions. Reports traditionally include various parameters for agent performance and contact center performance. But there can be so much more. For example, our product offers about 70+ unique reports covering every aspect of a contact center and offers various filters to extract reports as you need. Make sure you don’t have to keep transferring data to Excel to make sense of it.
Moreover, invest in a solution that invests in AI. We are building an AI-based tool which will give these intelligent insights to the contact center managers and the management of the business on how to run their setup. AI can use customer details and call patterns to make predictive suggestions. For example, “This time last year you had a higher than normal call volume. We suggest you have more agents on standby.”
Outages
Your contact center solution can crash. And often it does. When that happens, it spells havoc for your business. I see customer complaints about their contact center crashing almost once or twice a day. This is surprising. We have maintained our data centers with partners who offer world-class infrastructure (IBM) and deliver enterprise quality. Other than scheduled downtimes, we’ve NEVER seen any outages on the product.
And that’s saying a lot.
Want a contact center solution that is rich in features, dependable, and supportive?
