Grow sales and cut costs by moving your phone system to the cloud

Loyal customers have been the key for many businesses over the last 18 months, as we seek to adapt and grow through one of the most challenging times in memory for businesses. But how do we keep these loyal customers engaged, delighted, and recruit new advocates when the way we do business has been turned upside down?

Keeping customers loyal to your business will take more than frequent discounts and great products. Instead, helpful employees and prompt, convenient, and friendly service are more likely to make people buy from you again and again. In fact, creating exceptional customer experiences is so important that it makes you three times more likely to exceed your business goals and outrun competitors. And phone calls have a big role to play in these efforts. It’s often the main way you’ll deliver support, sell products, and talk to teammates.

Of course, we’re well aware of how hard it is to communicateeffectively with customers. Long hold time or inexperienced agents can make things go south quickly. And a legacy, on-premises phone system set-up doesn’t make your job any easier.

The high cost of legacy technologies

Using outdated phone technologies is painful, to say the least. For one, you’re likely to pay too much for poor outcomes, as in addition to buying or renting the PABX hardware, you’ll also spend money on recurring fees for maintenance and upgrades. Finding skilful technicians won’t be easy either as these professionals prefer working with newer technologies, while you get stuck with old tech.

And the system you’ll get is anything but flexible, a major issue in today’s fast-paced world. Your employees will end up being tied to their desks, unable to take calls at any time and from anywhere. They also won’t be able to work remotely and that can paralyse your business when disasters such as COVID-19 strike or your agents ask for flexible work arrangements.

Furthermore, let’s say your business booms in a post-corona world. You’re all excited and want to launch a new branch office and expand the existing one. That’s great news until you realise that an on-premises phone system means you have to buy new cables, install additional equipment, seek professional installation help, and spend a lot of money just to enable employees to make calls.

And despite all these investments, you end up with only limited insights into how your team performs. Lacking data collection and analytics capabilities, you find it hard to figure out how to make employees more productive or discover why customers are unhappy.

Cradle’s solutions are a flexible and scalable alternative

And now, some good news: Things don’t have to be so hard. Many companies like yours have ditched on-premises set up and opted for cloud-based calling solutions, like those offered by Cradle. They happily enjoy a range of benefits.

For instance, maintaining a phone system becomes cheaper. After doing a total-cost-of-ownership analysis, many companies have found that voice over internet protocol (VoIP) can help them save as much as 70% on their average phone and communications bill.

Furthermore, smart routing and other advanced features will ensure that your customers always reach agents with relevant skills. And as a result, your team will take less time to serve the same number of customers, freeing up time for other tasks, such as making sales calls. You’ll also experience up to 80% fewer missed calls.

Integrating Cradle with tools such as HubSpot will also enable you to capture all call activities in your CRM software, giving you a full picture of your sales and marketing team's output, helping measure the delivery of value. You can automate various administrative tasks, such as setting follow up tasks, meaning your team spend more time interacting with customers and prospects.

Your employees will be thrilled too, as cloud-based telephony tools enable them to work remotely. That work from home policy can finally work for those on the phones! The team can also operate on the move, with a seamless desktop-to-mobile live call transfer. This capability is particularly useful in business continuity planning. When a disaster strikes and your team can’t come to the office, cloud tech ensures your employees continue serving customers.

And with all those calls taking place, you want to collect and analyse as much data as possible. Once again, Cradle can help. The software makes it easy to collect and analyse communication reports, call logs, and other pieces of data. As a result, you get to learn how your agents perform and identify those in need of extra support. You might even spot hidden bottlenecks that were slowing down your growth for years.

Cloud-based tech ensures your customers fall in love with you and your team. And by delivering great customer experiences, you also get to boost your bottom line as people are willing to pay more to buy from a company known for great service.

Cloud-based tech as a way forward

Cradle helps companies take their business communications to a new level. If you’re curious to discover how much money you can save by opting for our product, we’ve built a calculator that provides an answer to that question. Add details such as team size, average call duration, and calls per user to arrive at the calculation.

Whether your team is big or small, moving your business calling to the cloud can make all the difference. You’ll not only save money but also make employees more productive. And you can grow easily as scaling no longer requires massive investments but is only a click away.