Telecommunication Revolution & Cloud Telephony
Every one talking that world power has shifted from west to east, next century belongs to India and China, as China is an aging country, everyone is betting very high on India. To find the reality, I have done a comparative study between India and western countries. The result was really depressing, in most of sectors/areas we are way behind the developed countries, except one sector i.e. “Telecommunication”.
You can see in the above picture the call rate, which was at Rs 15.5/min has dropped to less than a Rupee/min. The telephone subscriber base has also increased a rate of 40% YoY (approx.).
According to Mar’15 release by TRAI, India has 999.71 million telephone subscriber, now we are in Sep’15. We would have crossed 1 billion mark. This is the overall picture of telephone subscriber, but if we look internet and broadband subscriber base it is also very optimistic. Apart from that recently Airtel has launched 4G services in 296 town at a rate of 3G and coming dec’15 Reliance Jiu is going to start 4G services across India.
Let’s see the telecommunication revolution in B2B segment, undoubtedly the business segment also benefitted from government telecommunication policy, but new technologies have also drastically changed the communication in business segment. I am talking about “Cloud Telephony” or “Cloud Communication” or “Unified Communication Technology”.
Cloud Telephony is data communications technology where all communication applications, switching and storage devices are hosted at service provider premise, organization wanted to start the service just have to pay monthly charge and the full-fledged (i.e. IVR system, Recording, Analytics & many more) telephony service can be started on traditional phone, mobile or system i.e. desktop, laptop or tablet. It has also integrated text SMS, voice SMS, video and social media services, so organization can reach their customers via any channel.
If we look at the need of business segment, it is very different compared to consumer segment, Business segment needs.
- Easy & Faster deployment
- Less initial capital expense
- Flexibility in scaling
- Customization
- Reporting & Analytics
Cloud telephony satisfies all the above mentioned need, so it is like a boon for business segment. But many big players, for whom call centre is “bread & butter” can’t rely on another party for call centre maintenance, they can go for local setup or private cloud telephony, in which all the devices will be installed on their own premises.
Apart from providing next generation call centre solution, cloud communication is also very helpful in running innovative marketing campaign, you can start a missed call campaign, voice SMS campaign and any innovative digital campaign, the marketers have to just come up with campaign idea.
The best example of Innovative marketing campaign is “kan khajura Tesan” campaign started by Hindustan Unilever, the objective of this campaign was to connect with customers at “bottom of pyramid” who don’t have access to a computer or TV. With this campaign Hindustan Unilever was able to connect with 37 million people, the campaign was powered by Ozonetel a cloud telephony solution provider.
Cloud telephony has changed the world of communication no matter whether you want to build a large contact center, want to replace legacy business phone system, want to start a marketing campaign or if you are small player wants to start a toll free service, want to convert your mobile phone into business phone without missing any call everything is possible with cloud telephony.
The new telecommunication technologies are undoubtedly a boon for India, as they provide the backend support for the start-up ecosystem, whether it is Flipkart, Snapdeal, Practo or InMobi all have leveraged the potential of telecommunication and digitization, the success of these organizations has acted like a catalyst to start-up environment, many innovative ideas and start-ups are coming from every part of the country.
At last, I can say that leveraging telecommunication technologies and Start-up revolution are the only way by which we can transform India from a developing nation to a developed country. US has done this in 1990’s now its turn for India.
Note: This post is done by Abhay Kumar from Ozonetel Systems.