Encashing Calls, An Application Away!

Have you ever heard of a business be it micro, small, medium or large giving a miss to business calls. Business calls are precious and are treated with utmost care, even during personal emergencies. It is just not a cliche, if we say ‘Customer is the King'. It is very critical to give him the best experience and that first experience really matters either on call or during face-to-face interaction as it can lead to a long-term relationship.

The need of the hour is handling calls 24x7 and managing that data about prospective customers at a lower capital expenditure. Today, cloud telephony is at enterprises' service. Enterprises can bid farewell to traditional telephony system which involves huge capital expenditure on hardware and software licenses.

Cloud telephony offers much more capabilities and flexibility beyond traditional telephony systems. It enables businesses to improve profitability and service. It helps them to track and distribute calls between sales executives. Companies can have a single and special number for their businesses. It eliminates manual data documentation.

Cloud Telephony Market in India

India got the feel of cloud telephony around 2010 time-frame. The Indian cloud telephony service providers are a handful of entrepreneurs/ smaller players currently; and their company size ranges between `2 crore and `10 crore. Some of the key cloud telephony players include VMC Technologies, Exotel, Ozontel, Intelliverse, etc.

According to Sundeep Misra, Co-founder and CEO, VMC Technologies, "The cloud telephony market has reached maturity in the United States as it is operating since 2003 or 2004. India has just moved away from awareness stage. Indian cloud telephony service providers have crossed the hard route of creating awareness amongst customers. Initially, customers were unaware of cloud telephony. The markets is becoming better. It is much easier to close business now."

"In the US, each cloud telephony provider has a customer base ranging from 100,00 to 200,000 while in India each provider would have over 1,000 plus customers. VMC Technologies has over 400 customers and we have done about 1,000 plus installations," added Misra.

He anticipated, "In the next three to four years, it would be a trend and every small business would deploy cloud telephony service. There is a huge potential in India as the potential size of the customer base is around $30 mn, if we just consider 10% of this who would be willing to buy, that will still leave us with three mn customers."

According to VR Kirubakaran, Country Manager, Intelliverse Telecom, "The Cloud Communications market is growing rapidly in the India. Many organizations have started to benefit from outsourced Cloud Infrastructure and the market will drastically expand in the coming years. Cloud telephony is really taking a positive growing path in India for individuals, SME and government sector."

He added, "The future is bright for cloud telephony in India. In the next ten years, it's going to be in such widespread acceptance that we won't really have physical telecom infrastructure in our offices anymore."

Applications

At present, cloud telephony applications in India only supports inbound calls. It does not support outbound call due to the regulatory issues which does not let to call mobile users registered on do not call registry (DNCR). When Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) becomes prevalent in India, it enables the service providers to provide outbound services as well.

Cloud telephony applications are being deployed for customer management, support management, sales management, lead management, campaign management, and interview management.

Manish Pania, Vice President, sales and marketing, The Commune Real Estate Developers, shared, "Basically we wanted to have a robust solution at our end, which helps us to identify call, track calls and listen to customers' needs. Cloud telephony actually helped us to improvise inbound calls in pre-sales department. We could have integrated dialer but the cloud telephony services gave better and interesting features, monitoring and tracking are good and easy. Mechanism is very good in terms of managing software, to get reports and analysize. In a short span of time, we could improvise the quality of the staff. Through this mechanism we were able to know how the flow is and work around it."

Pricing Structure

The cost of cloud telephony is lower than that of traditional telephony solutions. The services are provided on pay-as-you-use/ pay-as-you-go model.

Misra disclosed, "Our pricing structure is subscription-cum-transaction based model. The basic pricing plan is `36,000 for a year which includes a single number and free 2,000 minutes per usage. Post that they will be charged for every minute."