VoIP has always saved businesses with lower costs, lower service fees and less maintenance. But the flexibility, integration and enhanced quality of future VoIP offers new efficiencies and cost savings in business overall. And next-generation VoIP will help protect the company from costly breaches with enhanced security. Over time, VoIP trends will begin to offer business benefits that VoIP pioneers could only dream of, such as super-high-quality calls, total integration, security, flexibility and intelligence. Five VoIP trends stand out as VoIP continues its evolution not only in call quality, but as future technologies prepare to make it central to the communications and business strategies of organizations of all sizes.
So what exactly can we expect from the future of the VoIP industry? Here are five VoIP trends:
1. Service Quality
5G technology is not only the faster version of the previous generation, but also much more than that, especially for VoIP calls. 5G networks will offer much better packet prioritization, superior network availability and improved reliability. It will also offer a service called network slicing, which is network virtualization to isolate tasks and the allocation of computing resources to optimize performance. 5G also includes a highly adaptive high-definition audio CODEC called EVS that detects and adapts to network conditions in real time.
2. UCaaS
Covid-19 pandemic caused face-to-face meetings to be replaced by digital communication, video conferences and VoIP calls. This changing business communication habit has also brought unified communications as a service (UCaaS) to the top. Both the remote working and UCaaS trend are expected to continue in the future. This could mean that UCaaS tools evolve to better handle office/remote hybrid working models over time.
3. Omnichannel Communications
The flexibility of future VoIP systems will help businesses deliver a customer-centric communications strategy. New technologies will make VoIP call data to be a part of an omnichannel approach to a unified customer experience. The next generation VoIP can convert data from calls to text and make queries on social, text, websites and other channels available to the call center. Therefore it ensures that the interactions that have taken place with a customer in all channels are visible and makes it possible for the customer to continue the conversation without any problems. Customer experience programs will focus on VoIP technology as it evolves to provide organizations with a better customer experience.
4. Artificial Intelligence
One of the most promising five VoIP trends is the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in VoIP services. AI-powered analytics, including sentiment analysis based on natural language processing, can analyze every customer call and extract insights into what callers are feeling. It does this by processing the words spoken in a call to detect not only their meaning but possibly the feelings and opinions expressed, which are then classified and organized to make previously unstructured data actionable. For businesses, this means a constant stream of data that can give you insight into the quality of your call center, the impact of ads, and the affinity customers have for your products and services.
5. Security
With regard to VoIP security, the risks relate not only to intrusive calls and unauthorized use of the system, but also to the use of VoIP systems to hack other parts of the company or data theft. Passwords, multi-factor authentication, encryption, and biometrics are effective security measures. However, this is not enough. Relying on blockchain technologies to decentralize control over the system could also be the future of security in the VoIP industry. Not leaving a single center for cyber attackers to focus on means making their job harder.