Top 3 Trends Driving Demand for VoIP

VOIP has been taking off, not just because it has a few great benefits, but also because it helps address a number of trends. Here is some background on a few of the trends that are particularly driving adoption.

Mobility and Remote Working

Mobility

Today’s modern workforce is mobile. With technology advances, specifically in mobile network coverage, the enablement of working on the go is better than ever.

Network coverage, from 3G to 4G, and even 5G in 2020, has improved vastly. There may be areas, remote and rural locations, still struggling with network coverage. On the whole, the scenario where you need to attend an important conference call no longer requires making your way back to the office.

Whilst not recommended, it’s entirely possible to host a video conference from the convenience of your car. VoIP enables softphone capabilities with more functionality than ever before. With one click, you can join a conference without the commute, and without the hassle of setting up a meeting room and conference phone.

Remote Working

A lesser extreme is the adoption of coffee shop working. Users can operate in the environment of their choice, safe in the knowledge that their desk phone is either diverted to their mobile or routed to ring on their mobile app or softphone before reaching voicemail.

Quality has always been a concern when on the move. Quality, jitter and packet loss has always been dependent on WiFi and mobile coverage. This doesn’t change. The quality of the WiFi and mobile coverage has changed and improved.

Mark Greenaway, Director of Emerging Business at Adobe, recently commented on the revolution of remote working:

“Remote working is one of the most revolutionary business trends of recent years, and have given rise to a host of technologies that provide a more intuitive working experience, improve employee productivity and unshackle people from the office”. 

Automation and Intelligence

Automation

In the IT industry, it’s hard not to be reading news and insights on Artificial Intelligence in other areas of business. Artificial Intelligence is great and certainly has its use cases. With VoIP, we don’t need to delve too deep into Artificial Intelligence to see why demand is so high.

Rather than Artificial Intelligence, we see keen interest in automation of tasks that were once manual and applying intelligence to business processes. Functions carried out by your phone system are no longer reliant on an instruction from a human, but can react to changes in service, quality and environment.

Before, during or after a voice call, intelligent VoIP monitoring tools can be used to address voice quality and set about fixing it. This reduces the number of tickets into the service desk and ensures users are receiving a consistently great experience.

Intelligence

A multi-tasking workforce requires a toolset working at optimum performance, all day, every day. On the outset, it looks like VoIP only provides the calling part of this toolset.

In reality, VoIP is the enabler. The glue pulling all parts of your communication and collaboration toolset together. VoIP is used as the core infrastructure integrating your CRM, office applications and third-party applications. This trend towards cloud-based VoIP applications, workforce apps and services integration will only continue to boost the productivity goals today’s employees and managers are striving to achieve. 

Cloud Adoption and Cloud Confidence

Cloud Adoption

ISDN technology is being phased out by BT. This isn’t news but has forced businesses to explore the option of SIP and VoIP technology. The undeniable success and adoption has led to more and more business following suit. When moving to VoIP, the business benefits have been quickly realised and IT Managers have become the central hub driving transformation.

Telecom industry data estimated 42 million business users will be subscribed to VoIP services by the end of 2018 -- which is almost double the number of VoIP implementations from four years ago. As the need for digital voice, video and data sharing among businesses increases, so does the rate of VoIP deployments.

Cloud Confidence

As cloud technology becomes the norm for deployments of most technology stacks, businesses have fully warmed up to the idea of the cloud. Be it infrastructure, hosting and applications or voice services, the most cost effective, secure and scalable method increasingly points to cloud deployment.

According to Statistica, company use of cloud-based services in the UK alone has seen an increase of 36% in the last 5 years. Put into perspective, that’s an adoption rate of 84% since 2015. IT managers and business leaders are more confident than ever when it comes to implementing cloud services.

Conclusions

The facts and figures around VoIP demand and cloud adoption speak for themselves. There are so many features and functionality sets driving the demand for VoIP in business. These features easily translate to business benefits and transformational insights.

The rise of mobility, automation and cloud adoption – and how VoIP enables these – are the key trends driving the demand for VoIP. The only change to these trends and levels of demand will be an increase.

If your business is finding itself needing to deal with any of these major trends, then it’s time to think about your requirements. Use our guide to what our hosted telephony packages include to check if you’re ready to make the next step.

If you would like to find out more, then you may like to read one of our other blogs or downloads, or request a conversation with one of our consultants. We are always happy to discuss, without obligation.