VoIP Trends for 2023: Latest Predictions To Watch Out For
The global VoIP market has seen exponential growth over the last 20 years. With continued technological enhancements, government support, and business adoption, the industry shows no signs of slowing down. Even with the uncertainty posed by the pandemic, the rise of remote working will cause the VoIP industry to grow in the coming years. In fact, it seems to be moving faster than ever in terms of usage, market share, and revenues. This is especially because VoIP trends are now gearing towards 5G adoption, UCaaS growth, and increased AI usage.
As more businesses rely on?VoIP?service providers for their main communications today, it’s important to follow VoIP industry trends to see whether your company is harnessing this technology to its full potential. Businesses regardless of size and scope can take advantage of these industry shifts in the coming years and maximize their investment in this technology.
The digital age has fostered a culture wherein everything is available on demand. This is businesses have a growing need for cost-effective communication solutions that can support enterprise mobility. This is where VoIP systems come in.
This technology allows users to implement flexible communication systems. With these at your disposal, you can accommodate calls, SMS, email, video conferences, and other types of communication methods that your business requires. What’s more, it can help you cut back on operational costs.
As you can see in the chart provided, VoIP tech can help reduce phone bills and teleconferencing costs by up to 30%. Meanwhile, these?flexible communication systems can save 40% on local calls?(Virtual PBX, 2013). Last but not least, it can help you save 90% on international calls.
This is why it comes as no surprise that the VoIP market is projected to grow up to $55 billion by 2025 (GlobeNewswire, 2019). After all, as businesses go global, they need solutions to improve communication and collaboration with remote employees. This increases the demand for VoIP products such as IP phones and cheap call plans.
In addition, government agencies and private companies worldwide are investing huge amounts of wireless telecommunication technologies such as 4G/LTE and the upcoming 5G network. These developments lead to higher transfer speeds for high-quality voice and data services for businesses.
With that said, we can expect that the VoIP industry will continue to evolve to make a greater impact on how global business is conducted. But of course, before we reap the benefits of VoIP innovations, we must first understand them. This is why without further ado, here are some of the VoIP trends to watch for 2021 and beyond.
1. 5G Will Go Mainstream
The fast-paced business landscape requires a communication process that can keep up with it. This is why the adoption of 5G networks are among the most talked-about VoIP market trends of today.
5G networks or fifth-generation wide-area wireless networks is a technology poised to transform internet connectivity as we know it. It is built to enable faster communication speeds and response rates while eliminating call jitter and packet loss during data transfer. Consequently, these will allow internet users to have a better mobile broadband connection, lightning-fast browsing speeds, as well as increased network capacities.
In addition, recent research by Verizon shows that the other perceived benefits of having a 5G network include better data transfer speeds (72%), improved connectivity of wearable tech (50%), and reduced instances of dropped calls (47%) (Verizon Media, 2019).
As a result, these benefits can only encourage more businesses to adopt VoIP, and those implementing VoIP will further expand their usage. In fact, just this 2019, 25 operators launched the 5G service (Deloitte, 2019). By the end of 2020, there were an estimated 218 million 5G subscribers worldwide, which exceeded forecast numbers. Furthermore, this number is expected to triple by the end of 2021 (CNet, 2020).
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2. Artificial Intelligence for Customer Service
Artificial intelligence is everywhere. It’s on Netflix, trying to find out what shows are most suitable for you. It’s on your social media feed, making sure you are getting updates from people most relevant to you. Moreover, it’s on the sites you visit, asking you what it is you need help with via chat.
VoIP won’t be any different in the next few years. In fact, according to a recent IDC study, some of the top AI investments include automated customer service agents ($4.5 billion), sales process automation ($2.7 billion), and threat prevention ($2.7 billion) (Business Wire, 2019). What’s more, research shows that 95% of customer interactions will be handled without humans by 2025 (Finance Digest).
As a result, 2018 saw an increase in AI start-ups and the adoption of this technology across various industries. This is a trend that we expect to bleed into 2021 and beyond. After all, it does offer quite a number of benefits for professionals.
For example, the call center industry has improved service delivery by providing self-help options that lead customers to quick solutions, enabling call center agents to focus and respond to more challenging issues. AI through bots will also grow in use to predict customer behavior and provide invaluable insights to businesses. You can check?how other companies use chatbots?to get a better idea as to how you can take advantage of this tech.
These said it makes sense that you learn how you can start incorporating this technology in your VoIP systems in the coming years.
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3. Smarter VoIP Assistants
Still on the topic of AI, the past few years have seen the rise of virtual assistants. A study by eMarketer revealed that in 2019, 39.4% of internet users use voice assistants monthly (eMarketer, 2019) . That is to say, roughly 111.8 million people use Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, and Google’s Ok Google to surf the web. What is more, at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, reports show that there was a 7% increase in voice assistant usage (GlobalWebIndex, 2020).
With continual advances in language processing, we can expect these virtual assistants to be even smarter in the sense that it can respond to more complicated questions from users. However, we have to note that this technology isn’t limited to making internet queries faster and easier. Just imagine what it can do for your VoIP system.
For instance, these virtual assistants can help you automate a lot of mundane processes such as routing calls to agents or sending calls to voicemail. Moreover, with these at your disposal, you no longer need to forward simple questions to agents because the virtual assistant can answer it for you.
Lastly, as these virtual assistants are, more often than not, powered by AI, it also has the capability to collect information about your customers. Meaning, it can record previous interactions automatically so that it is easier for agents to pick up calls where other agents left off. Thus, agents can provide more personalized service to clients.
From an internal communications standpoint, on the other hand, you can use advanced VoIP assistants to record meetings and transcribe them as you go. With this, you can cut down the time handling back-office tasks.
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