IP Telephony Triggers for Business

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The development of corporate telephony can be divided into several significant stages. These include the emergence of fundamentally new user shells, the introduction of cloud telephony integration with CRM systems, and the departure of voice communications to a narrow specialization. Artemy Moroko, CEO of SIPUNI, told RSpectr how the trends that influenced this segment of the telecom industry emerged, and predicted what could become a trigger for development in the future.

EVOLUTION OF THE USER SHELL

At the very beginning of the development of the cloud corporate communications market, many IP telephony capabilities were not used by customers due to the complex setup carried out by content writing service service specialists. Then a bold decision was born: to remove this weak link.

Make it so that cloud-based automatic telephone exchange (ATS) can be set up by people without special training – ordinary office workers and entrepreneurs

This trend began to emerge about ten years ago in the United States. The world was just entering the era of clear, minimalist shells, and at that time, only one Western telecommunications company partially used no-code programming for the user interface.




In Russia, the idea of ​​taking settings away from engineers and giving them to people without special qualifications was proposed in 2012. At first, it was met with skepticism on the market, but after a couple of years, an easily configurable no-code interface for cloud PBXs began to be implemented everywhere.

User-friendly shell helps telecom companies move away from fixed PBX settings

The era of more flexible logic has arrived, which has brought a lot of convenience to our main client – ​​the business subscriber. For example, for many companies, the voice menu is not suitable as a conversation starter, since it does not correspond to their internal processes. Now they have the opportunity to independently transfer it to any part of the conversation.

INTEGRATION WITH CRM SYSTEMS

In 2016, a new trend emerged on the market – integration of corporate communications with CRM systems (from Customer Relationship Management). At that time, sales departments of many organizations, which are the main clients, massively implemented CRM, and a natural need arose to couple administration services and voice traffic. Communication companies responded to the wishes of their main subscribers.

In terms of integration with CRM (as well as with no-code shells), the Russian market has found itself at the forefront of global trends

In Europe, for example, there is still no tight connection between CRM and telephony similar to ours. Europeans manually enter the fact of a call into the system.

We automatically put the call recording and its transcript. This way, the entire history of communications is saved and it becomes possible to conduct a deep content analysis to track call center errors and adjust scripts. Artificial intelligence is also used here.

Our competitor was the first to implement integration with CRM in 2016. We evaluated the idea and repeated it, and there is nothing to be ashamed of – this is a natural process in the market. Some things our colleagues look at us for, some things we take from the side, after we have looked closely at the new technology, counted the money, and waited.

We realized that growing companies with large call centers are making CRM a fulcrum for monitoring, checking and analyzing all voice traffic, and we picked up on this trend.

NARROW SPECIALIZATION

It is obvious that today the focus of corporate telephony has begun to shift towards servicing sales departments, for whom the main innovations are being implemented. How did sales departments become the main consumer of corporate communications services?

This is a natural process associated with the development of technology, and

Messengers played the main role here – they took over all communication with the accounting department, HR department, technical support and other departments

Thus, voice communication remained a necessary tool mainly for sales managers. All other employees, in principle, already manage or are potentially able to manage with messages.

The number of calls that companies actually need is shrinking. Voice communications are becoming more specialized. Telecom operators are forced to follow this trend and offer more targeted services.

That is why a mobile operator service for the sales department appeared in 2021. If earlier "communications specialists" accompanied the "salesman" at the cloud level in the computer, today they have reached the level of his mobile phone, where there is his personal application, helping not to miss a single client call.