Voice-based applications offer calling solutions for businesses and their customers. Modern consumers want flexible communication options, including chat, email, messaging, and voice. However, voice service is still critical to businesses of all sizes. According to ZDNet, 8 out of 10 customers prefer to call a company to resolve complex issues. Organizations also use voice applications for fast and convenient communication between employees. With more businesses switching to a remote or hybrid office arrangement, IT professionals must maintain critical voice services accessible to a distributed workforce.
Voice-based applications are critical to every type of business and come in various solutions. They provide calling within the organization to maintain productivity and allow employees to make and take calls outside the organization to improve customer service. A resilient voice network is important to ensure that your business or client’s essential voice services are reliable and can be accessed during an emergency to restore business operations.
What Are Voice-Based Applications and What Makes Them Mission-Critical for Businesses?
A voice application allows users to make calls over the internet using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). It offers versatility, allowing users to send and receive voice calls using their compatible phone, mobile device, or PC, and can be connected to an existing private branch exchange (PBX) or replace a phone system with enterprise-grade calling capabilities.
Related: What Is a Voice Application?
The application can work over a stable Wi-Fi, ethernet, LTE, or 5G connection, to provide your client or business with mobility, flexibility, and business continuity no matter where they are located. An application is critical when it is integral to your company or client’s operations. Voice is essential for businesses in every industry, allowing the organization to connect with customers and employees onsite or remotely.
In recent years, companies have shifted to hybrid and remote office arrangements, making clear, reliable, fast, and cost-effective communication necessary for productivity and essential business functions. Organizations have distributed workforces, sometimes worldwide, and can provide a consistent calling experience with cloud-based voice services.
What Are the Benefits of Communication Applications?
Voice-based applications are critical to modern businesses. Cloud-based VoIP and SIP implementations are an excellent way to safeguard business continuity. Implementing a voice application supported by a reliable network can enhance your company or client’s communications and provide several benefits to its operations:
- Efficient operations—communication applications allow you to automate your business or client’s repetitive calls to maintain efficiency during high call volumes.
- Improved productivity—voice-based assistants allow users to make hands-free calls and send voice-to-text messages, enhancing business productivity and relieving employee stress.
- Cost-effectiveness—cloud-based calling can reduce calling costs and provides enterprise-grade features at a lower cost than a traditional carrier.
- Scalable—cloud-based voice is scalable, and when the business uses a metered plan, it will only need to pay for the voice services used within a billing period. Administrators can add users and phone numbers from a simple web portal, and the network scales to accommodate inbound calls.
- Faster return on investment (ROI)—voice applications work with a stable internet connection, so your business or client will not require costly onsite infrastructure or technology to begin making calls. The company will be able to make a faster and more substantial ROI on the voice service than with traditional carrier solutions.
- Enhanced customer service—a voice-based application gives your client or company more options for customers to communicate with the business, enhancing the overall customer experience.
How Do Businesses Use Voice Applications?
Developers typically implement voice-based applications using an Application Program Interface (API) from the cloud-based service provider. They can deliver various business advantages, enhancing customer service and internal collaboration with reliable and scalable voice service. Your company or client depends on resilient voice communications to continue operations in an emergency. Businesses use the following critical voice applications.
VoIP and SIP Calling
VoIP is essential for businesses with an onsite, hybrid, or remote workforce. It allows distributed workforces to communicate with other users and customers more cost-effectively than traditional carrier lines. VoIP can be used for voice communications through an app over an internet connection, making it easy to maintain business communications. Users can continue consistently using the business phone system from remote locations from their VoIP app.
Integrating voice into SIP will allow the company to use chat, video, messaging, and voice on the SIP trunk, replacing costly primary rate interface (PRI) lines from a traditional carrier. A cloud-based SIP trunk provides nearly unlimited simultaneous communication channels, allowing employees and customers to communicate onsite and remotely, regardless of location, at a low cost.
Cloud-Based PBX
VoIP and SIP work with compatible IP PBX systems using a session border controller (SBC), a network device that connects the business phone system to the internet to facilitate VoIP or SIP communication with the voice provider’s network. Your client or business can use its existing PBX or a hosted PBX on the cloud. An enterprise-grade voice-based applications provider will offer business features like call transferring and forwarding over the internet to ensure the organization’s critical communications are reliable.
Click-to-Call Features
Along with your client or company’s VoIP, a click-to-call feature can be vital to business operations if the organization communicates with users from an app or website.
Ride-sharing and delivery apps depend on click-to-call features to allow users to communicate with employees and contractors providing a service to the customer. E-commerce and support companies rely on click-to-call features on their websites and apps to provide seamless communication with buyers and after-sale support. Providing customers with a fast and convenient method of communication is vital to many businesses.
Interactive Voice Response Systems
In addition to reliable voice communication, businesses with higher call volumes depend on interactive voice response (IVR) systems to automate receiving inbound calls. They take repetitive calls and can provide simple responses or transactions and direct callers to a live representative when necessary. IVRs manage call volumes and are vital to providing fast and high-quality customer service.
Businesses with a higher call volume can expect to see their call volumes increase. According to a study by McKinsey, over 6 out of 10 contact centers reported higher call volumes in 2022, and more than half of respondents expected call volumes to continue to increase. An IVR can be critical to delivering exceptional customer service in a high call volume environment.
Virtual Assistants
Voice-enabled virtual assistants are another form of automation that businesses depend on. If you have ever used Amazon’s Alexa or Google Voice Assistant, you are already familiar with voice-enabled virtual assistants. You can integrate a virtual assistant into your business or client’s app to allow users to search the web, ask questions, complete simple transactions, and make calls hands-free.
Text-to-Speech and Speech-to-Text Features
While text-to-speech and speech-to-text are typically a component of a voice-enabled virtual assistant allowing the user to make a voice request and provide a generated voice response, applications can also use the technology outside of the context of virtual assistants.
The features are vital to several applications, such as navigation apps or accessibility apps for blind and hard-of-hearing individuals. Companies also use them to increase users’ productivity with hands-free notation, calling, transcription, and message or email reading.
How Can You Ensure the Reliability of Your Mission Critical Voice-Based Applications?
Companies use voice-based applications for various operations. Your client or organization depends on mission-critical voice applications for normal business functions and productivity. It is vital to ensure that these critical elements of business are reliable and available whenever needed.
Related: Is VoIP a Reliable Solution for Business Communication?
Choosing a reliable cloud-based communications partner will ensure your business or client’s voice services are accessible onsite and remotely, providing continuity when the office must close due to an outage or it is unsafe for employees to come to the office.
A cloud-based solution is ideal for companies with a distributed remote workforce. Since the business phone system is not on-site, it can provide consistent call quality worldwide and improved reliability. Ensure your communications partner offers security and monitoring, physical network failover, and features like call forwarding to provide business continuity and maintain voice service.
Protect Your Mission Critical Voice Applications
Voice applications are essential for your business or client to communicate within the company and with customers. Various voice-based applications can be made more reliable and accessible using a cloud-based communication solution. Your business can communicate more efficiently and affordably over VoIP than traditional voice solutions.
When you partner with Flowroute, you can protect your client or company’s vital applications. The Flowroute Hypernetwork™ offers 24/7 uptime and reliability of 99.999% worldwide for your critical voice-based services. We guarantee delivery with physical failover that switches to a new network when there is an interruption to ensure inbound direct inward dialing (DID) calls are delivered to the intended recipient.
You can build the right solution for your client or business with our voice APIs, and we provide monitoring and security to ensure business communications are safe. Get started with our reliable voice communication network to protect your critical voice services.
