Cloud Telephony and IVR

Small businesses are created every day and most strive to increase their sizes to become medium or even large business. In the process of growing, both in size and in customer base, more resources are required by a business to stay connected to its customer base. The realm of customer service is no small part of a business. The advent of IVR systems served as a way for a businesses to avoid the need to invest time and money in a staffed call center to handle the daily volume of phone inquiries from customers and clients. Instead, calls could be interactively routed to the appropriate responder by a computer system rather than a human operator.

Cloud telephony could be the next evolutionary step forward in the realm of small business customer service. A drawback to a traditional IVR system is that the installation and start-up costs associated with implementing the technology can be prohibitively large. Cloud telephony offers the benefits of the IVR systems without the capital investments typically required. Rather than purchasing and physically locating the equipment on-site, the small business instead outsources the ownership to a dedicated service provider who assumes all installation and maintenance costs of the systems. Meanwhile, the small business "rents" the equipment for IVR and other uses and connects via Internet-based protocols. This would allow small businesses to be more competitive with larger firms in the same markets by cutting the costs associated with creating complex IVR systems for customer service. There are still issues to be resolved with basing such a concept on Internet protocols, but the approach could allow for better customer service for businesses of any and all sizes.