New Trends in VoIP Technology
VoIP has become the preferred communication infrastructure for many business organizations thanks to its many benefits such as cost-savings, scalability, flexibility, and efficiency.
In order to get the most out of your service, you should leverage the latest in VoIP technology. Here are 5 key trends to look out for:
1. AI-Driven Technologies
More VoIP providers will be using artificial intelligence to deliver better services and help users generate business insights.
AI can recognize poor call quality and troubleshoot in real-time — fixing issues such as low bandwidth, incorrect network configuration, and high-latency issues — without any human intervention. This can help improve call quality and minimize interruptions.
Natural language processing technology can improve the call answering capabilities via voice assistants (e.g., Alexa, Cortana, Siri) by analyzing customer interactions. With an enterprise VoIP application, you can use voice bots to handle FAQ-type inquiries so you can improve customer experience, lower response time, and free up live agents to resolve escalated issues.
In addition, AI-powered communication programs can analyze text correspondence and speech patterns to generate insights for sales and marketing so your team can improve messaging, customer service, and sales tactics.
2. Mobile Integration
The introduction of 5G technology provides faster connections, reduces issues such as packet loss and call jitters, and delivers superior call quality. As a result, more users will be using mobile devices for VoIP calls.
In addition, the “Bring Your Own Device” trend in the workplace means more employees will use their mobile devices for work, requiring better access to VoIP services via softphone devices (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops.)
VoIP vendors will be investing more resources in mobile integration to ensure seamless user experience and expanding the capabilities of their mobile apps to attract more customers.
These VoIP applications will allow users to start a task on one device and carry it over seamlessly to other devices. Such real-time continuity can help employees increase mobility and productivity without missing a beat.
3. Unified Communication (UC) Functions
Most VoIP services go beyond delivering voice calls to incorporating other communication and collaboration features, such as voicemail, video conferencing, screen sharing, instant messaging, live chat, and file sharing to help organizations streamline communications, improve teamwork, increase cost-efficiency, reduce errors, and boost productivity.
As more enterprises adopt UCaaS (Unified Communication as a Service) to consolidate their communication needs into one centralized platform, VoIP providers will develop more features to enhance team collaboration, content sharing, and meeting support to attract business users.
The development of UC features will go hand-in-hand with mobile integration to ensure that users can seamlessly move across different devices when performing a single task.
To further enhance productivity, VoIP providers will add more third-party integration capabilities to ensure that your other business applications (e.g., CRM, customer service, customer data management) can work seamlessly with your communication tool.
4. Hosted/Cloud-Based Solutions and Internet of Things (IoT)
As more enterprises are realizing the benefits of cloud computing — such as scalability, flexibility, mobility, efficiency, security, and cost reduction — the popularity of hosted VoIP solutions will continue to rise.
These cloud-based solutions enable the integration with IoT devices for extended capabilities and enhance the application’s “real-world” interactions with other smart devices — from light switches and laptop to wearables and office security systems — so you can customize business operations while improving working condition.
These functionalities can also be used to support offline business activities, such as retail and trade shows, to facilitate team communications and improve customer experience.
5. Security
Cybersecurity will continue to be a key concern for many organizations and for a good reason. The global average cost of a data breach is $3.86 million while IT downtime can cost $5,600 per minute.
As VoIP gains popularity, it will also become the target for more hackers. Providers will protect their platforms against cybercriminals by dedicating added resources to implement the latest cybersecurity best practices via frequent software updates and platform maintenance.
The need for heightened and most up-to-date security measures will make cloud-based VoIP service even more cost-efficient since businesses don’t have to bear the expense of keeping up with the latest IT security protocols or hiring a large in-house team to perform maintenance.
Access the Latest VoIP Technology For Your Business
Choosing the right service provider is the key to accessing the latest VoIP technology for your business.
When choosing a VoIP service, inquire about the provider’s development roadmap to ensure that it includes the features and functionalities you need to achieve your business objectives.
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