Rapid growth, as is expected with startups, always ends up testing a company's communication infrastructure. It’s our communication in which we can become quietly habitual, with overly simplified channels and odd idiosyncrasies that quickly become accepted.
With the choke points of legacy systems being inevitable, startups need to think about scalability before it occurs. And, with communication, that means moving towards cloud services and PBX, which stands for private branch exchange.
As headcount increases, so does the complexity of the organization - not least with hybrid workers, which means continuously adapting (sometimes, being 100% remote can actually be more straightforward when it comes to communication). It’s estimated that miscommunication costs US businesses around $2 trillion annually, which is over $15,000 per employee.
Unlocking agility and efficiency with cloud PBX
The global Unified Communications as a Service market includes Cloud PBX, and this market is projected to grow into the hundreds of billions. The trend is in part driven by PBX, as it’s a transition that brings scalability - user capacity can quickly go up or down, and these services adjust instantly.
Migrating to a cloud PBX provider will cut down on the large up-front capital investment into a more predictable operational costs. And, seeing as cash flow is the main enemy of startups (along with fluctuating interest rates), this is important for stability.
There’s a certain geographical flexibility when turning to the cloud, as it supports using offshoring services too, and ultimately keeps communications for distributed teams more centralized (or fragmented when beneficial, and you have good control over this). Many reports find that over half of companies using on-premise PBX are looking to move towards cloud PBX within the next three years. Soon, on-premise PBX will be a thing of the past.
More features help stay competitive
Modern Cloud PBX platforms are of course not just basic telephony - their digitization opens the door to many features, like automatically transcribing voicemails and sending them as an email. With the integration of AI, too, you can get just the quick, written text summary of a long, detailed voicemail. This helps with prioritization.
Both internal comms and being responsive to external clients are both improved and consolidated. Call data is gathered and analyzed, such as providing insight into agent performance and customer patterns. It’s a much easier way of tracking KPIs.
Forward-looking communications
Moving towards cloud PBX is going to quickly reap a return, in part because of its initial low-cost nature. As-a-service models, while seemingly everything is going this way, perfectly suit a startup that has low cash but could be scaling up at any time. The subscription nature of the agreement actually incentivizes and funds new updates too, so you’re less likely to get stuck with an outdated operation. In order to continue providing value to justify these ongoing costs, call routing becomes more intelligent, AI becomes implemented more, and general innovative features are continuously released.
Cloud PBX as a means for growth
Cloud PBX isn’t just about adapting to changing demands, but actually driving this growth through gains in efficiency and delivering better customer service and conversion of leads. For businesses looking to make this switch, the cost-benefit analysis looks promising, with a lot of upside and very little financial risk. But, admittedly, it can depend on your broader system, such as an ERP, or lack thereof - something that requires attention first.
