Ring Ring, The VoIP Future For Call Centres Is Calling

If anyone had to imagine a call centre (myself included), it would comprise of a huge room full of desks, people with headsets and probably a mind-boggling amount of copper wires everywhere. If a new hire came onboard, chances are you would need to call in an engineer, buy yet another handset and pray the wiring cupboard didn’t set itself on fire.

Fortunately, that world is going, going, gone – all thanks to VoIP. Voice over Internet Protocol has been a big reason why call centres in particular have moved away from a clunky hardware mess to something far more nimble.

The global VoIP services market is sitting at $185 billion this year, on track to reach $280 billion by 2030 with contact-centre-as-a-service growing nearly 17% a year. So if you’re a call centre still running on traditional phone lines, bad news. You’re not just behind the curve, you’re on a different curve entirely. And it’s not heading in the direction of the future.

Why The Death Of The Desk Phone Happened

It’s simple: traditional phone systems were built for a world that no longer exists. In that world, everyone commuted to the office, sat at their desk and made their calls on the same physical line day after day. VoIP swiftly took all of that and moved it onto the Internet. And no one is really mourning the fact that it happened.

With VoIP, calls travel as data on the Internet, not as electric signals down a wire. It may sound like just a small technical distinction, but it changes absolutely everything about how a call centre can operate.

For a start, you don’t have to wait days or weeks for a new line to be installed and onboarding can be done almost instantly. If you plan on opening an office in another country, that used to require a budget and a timeline. Now, it really just needs a login.

Reports show that businesses that have made the switch to VoIP have saved up to 90% compared to traditional setups, mainly due to the scrapped hardware that’s no longer needed, lower call charges and no maintenance contracts.

Your Best Agent Could Live Miles Away – And That’s No Problem

So here’s where it gets interesting, especially for call centres. VoIP runs on the Internet so all that your team needs is a laptop, a headset and a decent Internet connection. The whole geographic model of the call centre has come apart at the seams. You don’t need to be tied to a desk any longer.

The knock-on effect of that is enormous. For managers, it opens up a much wider talent pool which is incredibly useful considering the call centre turnover sits at 40%-45% a year and finding good staff is a constant struggle.

For agents, getting flexibility that they didn’t have before is also a good reason to stay with the company for longer. And on the productivity size, a Zoom survey found that managers rate their hybrid and remote teams as 62% more productive than their in-office ones. The age-old assumption that a good call centre needs everyone together in one room has been thoroughly disproved.

Customers Will Notice, Even If They Can’t Put Their Finger On It

Aside from the cost savings and clever tech that comes with VoIP, the biggest change is actually the one that customers will notice. It’s the smallest things, but they happen to be the biggest contributors to the customer’s overall experience. Shorter waiting times, not being tossed back and forth between agents like a ping pong ball and agents who already know their history as soon as they’ve given their name.

VoIP offers a properly unified setup where voice calls sit right next to other channels from Slack to CRM platforms, and pulls from the same customer record. Just that change alone can make calls run that much smoother.

What Comes Next For The Future Of VoIP?

VoIP is becoming the default communication system in a lot of businesses, call centres included. So naturally in the future, the debate will be around what you build on top of it.

We can likely expect to see more AI, especially in the automation of the routine tasks with more of the simpler queries being handled without a human at all. It’s not necessarily a bad thing for agents themselves, it just means that the calls reaching them will probably be the higher-value ones where human judgement will really matter.

The traditional call centre isn’t quite dead, and it would be incorrect to say that it is. However, it’s certainly on its way out along with landline call systems. What’s replacing it is a smart, distributed AI-assisted operation that just happens to answer the phone.