The cloud has revolutionised the business communications landscape and now enables small businesses to get access to top-grade communications technology without having to spend top dollars. More and more small organisations are now turning to cloud communications, moving away from physical phone systems for their offices.
Beyond cost savings, there are plenty of reasons why this choice is proving popular and successful. In this article, we present some of the key benefits of cloud communications and how this is opening up new opportunities for smaller businesses.
Enterprise-level features on lower-priced plans
With a cloud delivery model, organisations no longer need to invest in substantial amounts of capital investments for expensive on-site equipment and hardware, and they have access to communication features like auto-attendant, call forwarding or call screening. The cloud makes it easier for smaller organisations to access enterprise-level features through a pay as you go model that not only reduces costs but also give them the flexibility and scalability they need as they thrive and grow.
Ability to project a bigger image
The great thing about cloud phone systems is that it makes your business seem bigger than it already is. This is not to say that you are misleading your customer base. Rather, you want to project the legitimacy and professional image that is usually associated with big organisations.
With a cloud solution like RingCentral Office, you can give off that professional image by having a phone system that automatically answers all calls and routes them to the correct departments or extension, instead of having an actual person answering the phone and manually transferring it to other lines.
The great thing about cloud phone systems is that it makes your business seem bigger than it already is. Click To Tweet
Having the right phone number can also help you project a bigger image. A toll-free number, for example, can help you establish a national presence, while an international number can help you build a presence in a different country.
And because it is cloud based, you do not even need to have actual physical offices around the globe. You can expand your reach virtually instead.
Supporting a remote and mobile workforce
Another benefit of cloud communications is the ability for small businesses to support remote and mobile workers. By virtue of being delivered via the internet, users can access their company’s business phone system from virtually anywhere as long as they have an internet connection.
This also opens up the possibility of hiring remote workers for small and medium-sized businesses. They are no longer limited to hiring within the city or locally. They can now hire people from all over the globe. This means access to more talents for the company.
Unlimited scalability
Another advantage given by a cloud-based communications solution is its ability to adapt to the economic condition of the company.
If your company is growing, adding new users with new phone numbers and virtual extensions would only require a few taps. And if the company is facing some struggles and would need to downsize, removing users, phone numbers, and virtual extensions is just as easy.
Increased productivity through interoperability of different cloud business apps
Another advantage of cloud-based technology is that it usually plays nice with other cloud-based apps. RingCentral’s cloud-based phone system, in fact, has its own App Gallery featuring different integrations to different cloud apps. These integrations increase productivity by adding a communications component right into some of the most popular business apps.
Each integration can have different functions including:
- Automatically matching callers to existing records in cloud CRM apps
- Being able to instantly click to dial phone numbers on popular cloud productivity apps
- Sending faxes directly from cloud storage apps
Some of the RingCentral integrations include:
- Microsoft Office 365 integration
- Agile integration
- Zoho CRM integration
- Box integration
- Google integration
You can also add a communications component on your customised solution through RingCentral APIs if you are not using any of the apps in the gallery.
These are some of the key benefits that cloud communications offer to small businesses and help them remain competitive in a fast-moving environment.
Originally published Aug 15, 2018, updated Jan 30, 2020
