Why should you let someone else manage your calls?

If you are a startup that is trying to set up a telecommunication infrastructure for customer support, sales or general customer interactions, it will always take a certain amount of time and monetary investment to set one up the traditional way. If you set up an EPABX system, as your startup grows, it will require more time and monetary investment. You will be expanding and scaling your infrastructure time and again.

Managing a telephonic system  within your startup will become a chore in itself. It will add unnecessary responsibilities on your shoulders. You will have to hire new employees or probably a third party consultancy that keeps the system up and running. Very soon you will be paying an astronomical amount of money while also spending a lot of time to expand and enhance this system as and when your customer base grows.

This is why building your infrastructure on cloud telephony becomes the smart thing to do.

Leave it to the specialists

Implementing and building your own call center solution is not as tough a task as it used to be about 10-20 years ago. Technology has progressed in a lot of ways over the years and it’s becoming a lot easier. Still, in this area, even if you develop your own solution, it takes a lot of investment and time to get used to the system.

VEPL is a training firm that offers a highly personalized and unique service that helps students improve their GRE scores through online study programs. With a customer promise of high degree of personalised attention, they needed a telephony system that was highly customisable and reliable.

Anand, the MD & Co-founder of VEPL said, “We considered developing such a system internally, expending some R&D clock cycles but abandoned that approach due to the high difficulty and cost of the project and the need to focus on our core technology – the tracking and improvement of learning. Most solutions also require what Jeff Bezos once called “undifferentiated heavy lifting”, managing clumsy clusters of telephone lines, servers, software, redundancy and a stand-alone support and maintenance team. Often, these are far away from your core skills and best done by someone else who focuses on it exclusively.”

Read the full story about how VEPL picked Exotel over building and customizing their own telephony solution for customer support

In-depth training is required and consumes a lot of time

Roughly speaking, every employee in your self-developed call center will be trained on how to use the system for 2-3 weeks before they can start taking actual calls from customers. Let’s try and figure this out. Suppose you hire a couple of people for your support team that will handle every inquiry and complaint that comes in.  You have to train these personnel to know the system in and out. Not only will you have to train them about the technical aspects of your offerings but also about how your call center works.

Whereas, a third party system is much easier to learn as it has a step by step tutorial for each operation that is performed. Plus, these systems have rock-hard support systems and documents that cover each and every aspect of the software.

Access and makes call in minutes

These systems are ultra-portable and stable. I am not saying that your own infrastructure is not. But consider this as an example. Your company is a new kid on the block that went big. Now you need to move to a new office or develop a new infrastructure.  Instead of shifting the system there or shutting it down and starting all the tasks again from scratch, what sets these systems apart is that they can be deployed within minutes, whatever the situation maybe.

You just have to hit the turn on switch and add a few new users from the web dashboard system and voila, your telephonic system is online and ready to take and make calls.

If you can do all this, you are looking at a firm that does the technical work for you and you have to concentrate on the real work at hand. The cloud-based service will be setup for you, with you.

Richa Kar, the CEO & Co-Founder of Zivame said “We needed a small call center requirement and that too quickly, something we understood in the leadership team ourselves and could grasp the working + functionality without spending too much time on it. Exotel was a great plug n play system which took less than 2 days to setup and helped us manage all our call center needs immediately during scale.”

Full story of how Exotel powered Zivame’s call center here.

The age of Cloud Telephony

Most of the start-ups today are expanding phenomenally. They start from one location and start expanding to different locations in just a couple of years or sometimes even months. Not only is setting up a call system at every location not just feasible but also silly, considering the technological solutions present today.

Today with the onset of cloud-based call solutions we really don’t have worry about this anymore. Why not set-up a cloud structure and link your existing handsets to that and forget about physical hindrances.

Why not let a third party system manage all the technical aspects of implementing a call structure for you instead of you dedicating a team to manage your cupboard doodly stuff.

These cloud-based systems take care of everything. Be it incoming and outgoing calls, routing calls, recording them for training and dispute resolutions, automated calls and SMSes for all customer interactions and feedback.

Plus, these cloud-based call systems are highly reliable.

Exotel handles over a million calls a day and has the best in business uptimes of 99.94%.

Your problems are now their problems

Once you have implemented a cloud-based system into your company’s operation, all your call related headaches are their problem to handle. This basically reduces the operational pressure on you by letting the third party provider handle it.

Since the call services will be provided to you by a third party firm, closely knit to your infrastructure, every operation would be taken care by the service provider. This will, in turn, allow swifter and more resolute solutions to any use case and the problems faced by your organization.