There’s been a stone age, a space age and an internet age. You might call the period we’re in now the cloud age.

Cloud has been around for a long time, but suddenly it seems indispensable. The pandemic has helped that process, of course. Businesses with cloud based communications and productivity tools transitioned to home working last year with relative ease.

But it’s not just the lockdown effect. The pandemic accelerated trends that were happening anyway. Larger organisations were already familiar with storing data and services in the cloud and making them accessible to staff wherever they happened to be. Growing numbers of smaller companies were attracted to pay-per-user Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions like Office 365 and QuickBooks

The promise of cloud computing

The appeal of cloud is not difficult to fathom, and the case is as persuasive for small businesses as it is for enterprise.

In a word, cloud makes you agile. The most obvious manifestation of that is in the way it facilitates a ‘work anywhere’ culture. If you can access your documents wherever you have an internet connection, you can be more productive for more of the day. You can work effectively at home, but also in the local coffee shop, at a client’s office or on the train to an important meeting.

But agility is about more than just facilitating remote work. Another major benefit is the inherent scalability of many cloud solutions. That means you can add new users in a couple of clicks and remove them just as easily. That in turn means you no longer have to invest in spare capacity “just in case”. With cloud services, even businesses with regular peaks and dips in demand need only pay for capacity they actually use.

Cloud lets you exploit new opportunities as soon as they arise, and equip new sites or offices in a much shorter time. It also adds hugely to your resilience. Whether it’s a traffic jam on the motorway or a devastating flood, anything that stops employees accessing a central location is potentially disruptive for businesses that rely on on-premise solutions. When you don’t have that dependence, you don’t have so much of an issue.

Different solutions have different benefits

Many of these benefits are shared by all cloud solutions. But each solution also has advantages that are unique.

For example, a cloud-based office suite like Office 365 or Google Workspace lets employees work on the same version of a document at the same time, wherever they happen to be. That ability alone puts an end to one of the great bugbears of modern office life: the endless email chain of minor modifications. With one version of the truth, cloud based documents avoid the confusion that endless iterations of the same project can create.

And cloud communications solutions have a long list of benefits of their own, too. Hosted voice does away with the need for on-premise hardware, and the maintenance and monitoring that goes with it. It lets employees work securely on a range of devices, from smartphones and tablets to desktops and laptops. Cloud-based unified communications give you a complete communications and collaboration suite (audio, video, chat, presence) in one package, simplifying the user experience and reducing your administrative burden.

Digital transformation and the cloud

It’s all part of a digital transformation that is making business more flexible, scalable and responsive. Cloud is levelling the playing field, and giving smaller businesses access to the kind of sophisticated tools and services that were previously the sole preserve of larger competitors.

With that in mind, is it time your own business moved more services to the cloud? There’s certainly a good case when it comes to core operations like telephony and communications. Cloud-based communication and collaboration tools proved their worth during the pandemic, and have the added advantage of preparing your organisation for the upcoming ISDN switch-off. If you’re continuing with remote or semi-remote teams, good hosted voice solutions offer rich data and analytics that help you keep on top of efficiency and productivity.

Clear Voice from Vaioni is one hosted voice solution that offers all these benefits and more. It comes with all the standard call management features you’d expect, alongside built-in analytics and reporting, an array of useful integrations and a cost-effective, per-user-per-month pricing model. It’s controlled from a single portal, and the user-friendly interface means users require little training to successfully adapt to the system.

Clear Voice is a new disruptive force in the hosted voice market, and we’ve launched it just as many organisations are looking to accelerate their own digital transformation. If your business is looking to take the next step to the cloud, Clear Voice is an obvious place to start.

As we’ve all found out over the last year or so, a business continuity crisis can catch anyone unawares.

Covid-19 reshaped economic life in a way that nothing else in living memory has. An army of workers decamped to home offices and back bedrooms. Customers turned to online communications, e-commerce and cashless payments in unprecedented numbers. The diversification of supply chains became a business critical issue.

Covid isn’t over, though we may (fingers crossed) be entering its final phase. But even if it is, business continuity incidents come in all shapes and sizes. Anything that disrupts your ability to operate comes into this bracket, and some of these threats are growing, even as Covid recedes.

Business continuity threats

For example, it’s now generally recognised that extreme weather events are becoming more common. Extreme heat, floods, cold and snow can all undermine your business, even if they don’t directly impact your offices.

A flood only has to stop key employees getting to work to become a business continuity issue. Heat or snow that closes schools leaves your staff with childcare issues that affect their ability to work productively. A hurricane on the other side of the world can seriously delay the arrival of an essential component.

Then there’s theft, vandalism or the activities of a clumsy contractor cutting through the wrong pipe. And of course, cybercrime is a constant threat. A new survey by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) finds that four in ten businesses report having cyber security breaches or attacks in the last 12 months. Among those that have identified breaches or attacks, around a quarter experience them at least once a week.

Is cybersecurity a business continuity issue? If a ransomware attack locks you out of your crucial data and services, it clearly is. A denial of service attack that closes your e-commerce site is as potentially damaging in 2021 as a flood at your physical premises.

Prepare for the unknown

The results of a business continuity incident can differ widely. Like Covid, it may force a fundamental reappraisal of the way we work and do business. Or like a burst water main, it may close your office down for a couple of days. Either way, in the modern business environment downtime isn’t an option. Wise businesses prepare for the unknown, and put business continuity planning into place.

A business continuity plan is a holistic document that details everything from points of contact in the event of an emergency to the details of commercial property companies with spare temporary office space. But in the modern digital world, a huge part of it is inevitably disaster recovery.

A disaster recovery plan explains how you’ll get essential services back online after a business continuity incident, and how you’ll equip employees with the digital tools and apps they need to be productive, regardless of wider circumstances.

Disaster recovery planning is essential, and happily it’s been made much easier by the advent of the cloud. As we saw during the first Covid lockdown, organisations that had already transferred core services to the cloud enjoyed a far smoother transition to home working than those that were still heavily dependent on on-premise solutions.

Anywhere, anytime work

The beauty of the cloud when it comes to business continuity is obviously that staff can access cloud-based services from anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Productivity isn’t dependent on communal presence in a central location. That isn’t just important during a once-in-a-century global pandemic. It can help your business continue operating effectively during any of the scenarios described above.

Many businesses aren’t in a position to transfer all digital operations to the cloud, and some don’t want to, primarily because of security concerns. But in some areas cloud has undoubtedly shown its worth, proving itself far more agile than on-premise alternatives and at least as secure.

Chief among them is unified communications (UC). At the start of the pandemic, the priority for businesses was communicating with concerned customers and collaborating internally. Everything had to be done from home. Cloud-based UC solutions let every employee take professional communications home with them, and carry on as normal. The transition was seamless, for both customers and colleagues.

Clear Voice for a clearer future

Whatever the disaster, the ability of colleagues to make and take professional business calls from anywhere, and to collaborate in real time, is clearly of huge benefit. And with our own UC solution, agility doesn’t require compromise. Clear Voice is a sophisticated, cloud-based communications and collaboration tool that includes rich data and analytics, a simple-to-use softphone app and a wide range of call management features. It’s available wherever you and your employees have an internet connection. It’s also extremely competitively priced.

In other words, Clear Voice is a great communications solution at any time. The fact that it also prepares your business for the next business continuity crisis is an added bonus. But the future is uncertain, and Clear Voice is an easy way to prepare for whatever it might have in store.

It’s widely accepted that the Covid pandemic made an unmatchable business case for cloud communications. Within the space of two fraught weeks in March 2020, the ability to communicate professionally and smoothly from anywhere, on any device, became a business-critical benefit.

But of course, there were plenty of organisations that muddled through Covid without switching to cloud-based communications. There were plenty that managed with the most basic IP telephony. With lockdown easing and the vaccine rollout continuing apace, many businesses may decide to kick the modernisation of their own communications into the long grass. Surely the urgent business case for hosted voice is over?

Benefits beyond the pandemic

Nothing could be further from the truth. Hosted voice proved its worth during the pandemic because it made businesses more flexible, and that need isn’t going away.

This pandemic may be nearing its end, though the unknown threat from new variants makes it impossible to say for sure. But the next disruption to your normal business operations may be just around the corner. Fire, flood, theft or cyber attack: they could all force your workers to swap the office for the back bedroom at home.

And then, of course, there’s the prospect of long-term remote or ‘hybrid’ work. You might be dead set against it, but if your best employees want the option, and your biggest competitor offers it, will you really be in a position to refuse?

The reality is that flexible working is an idea whose time has come. According to some estimates, three or four times as many people could be working at home after the pandemic than before it began. Google is just the latest company to offer hybrid work, and where the tech giants lead others usually follow.

A remote working solution…and much more

In other words, hosted voice is a brilliant solution for remote work, giving your teams the tools they need to communicate and collaborate professionally from anywhere.

But it’s also much more than that, because the need for agility is about far more than equipping home workers.

For a start, the ‘work anywhere’ philosophy might mean working on the train or in the airport lounge. Hosted voice helps on-the-go staff work more effectively at any time. That’s important, because flexibility will be key when the pandemic ends.

There’s much more. With a more dispersed and nomadic workforce, managers need comprehensive data to measure and improve productivity, and ensure customers are being effectively and efficiently served. They need to be able to scale their communications needs easily as demand rises or falls.

And wherever they are, in the office or out, staff need the kind of call management features that create better customer interactions, with fewer missed calls, more efficient call routing and more targeted conversations. They also need to be able to work together easily. Collaboration has always been crucial to business success. Making sure more dispersed teams can collaborate effectively is a post-pandemic priority.

Better communications – lower cost

You might be thinking that the Catch-22 here is price. Businesses need to be able to do all this without blowing the budget. There’s not a lot of money floating around after a crisis like Covid.

But cost is actually another tick in the hosted voice ‘pros’ column. With cloud communications, there’s no on-premise equipment so no CapEx outlay and no ongoing maintenance costs. And because hosted voice offers unified communications (generally combining voice, video, chat, presence and collaboration tools in one package), you don’t have to shell out for third-party apps to fill gaps.

Clear Voice from Vaioni is a hosted voice solution that will make your business more agile for the pandemic and beyond, and at a highly competitive cost. It’s a true cloud-based unified communications solution, offering rich data and analytics so that managers can more easily monitor efficiency and productivity at team or individual level. A range of call management features like unlimited IVR, Hunt Groups, call recording and Wallboards come as standard.

Clear Voice lets you scale easily, adding users in just a couple of clicks. It encourages collaboration thanks to seamless integrations with Microsoft Teams and Office 365.

On top of it all, our low-cost per-user-per-month charging model makes sure there are no surprises when it comes to billing. With Clear Voice, you only ever pay for the capacity you need, and never for any you don’t.

It’s obvious why hosted voice was a winner during the pandemic, but it’s also clear why the benefits that were so attractive a year ago will confer huge business advantage in the post-pandemic era. There’s no vaccine against the need for agility. Refined features, easy scaling, pay-as-you-grow pricing and ‘work anywhere’ functionality will be as important in 2022 as they were in 2020. Clear Voice from Vaioni offers them all.

The post-lockdown period is likely to be tough for organisations and their employees, but there is one way to make it easier for everyone.

Continual learning is a blessing for both businesses and staff. In fact, experts say that AI, automation and new working models are making lifelong learning an economic imperative. Eighty percent of CEOs believed the need for new skills was their biggest business challenge before the pandemic. Covid has only accelerated the adoption of new technology and, with it, the need to quickly upskill employees.

Staff will thank you for offering new learning opportunities. According to Gallup, almost nine out of 10 millennials rate professional or career growth and development opportunities as important to them in a job.

Meanwhile, pre-pandemic research by City & Guilds Group found that a lack of in-work learning meant two thirds of respondents felt negatively about their career prospects. Opportunities for development have become one of the most important factors in workplace happiness.

In other words, organisations that offer lifelong learning opportunities stand to gain in a number of ways. They’ll acquire the skills they need to fully exploit a new wave of technology and fill a new generation of job roles, and they’ll create a better workplace culture that makes recruitment and retention easier.

Thinking beyond technical skills

If lifelong learning is win-win for business, what should it entail?

The obvious answer is key technical skills. Even before Covid, the shelf life of a job skill had been calculated at just five years. Keeping employee skill sets continually refreshed will be essential for business success in almost every sector.

That means updating the skills staff need now, and making sure they’re prepared for the skills they might need in future. But many experts argue that the key skills employees will need five years from now are hard to predict. Technology and the nature of work are moving at breakneck speed.

In which case, the best way to make sure your business always has the skills it needs is to foster a culture of curiosity. The skills of tomorrow might be difficult to predict, but businesses that are collectively curious and keen to learn new things will always be one step ahead of the competition.

According to Peter Carlin, managing director of digital learning provider Logicearth, “many companies may not know what roles will be needed in terms of skills and knowledge, so people’s capabilities need to be built to help them prosper in any role. Things like critical thinking, collaboration, communication, adaptability and resilience.”

How do you foster a culture of curiosity, or for that matter a resilient workforce? The answer, experts say, is to make learning part and parcel of every employee’s working life, even if not all the subjects they study have immediate relevance for their day to day roles.

For example, some companies are now letting staff take courses in subjects as diverse as crochet, beer brewing and filmmaking, as well as in more obviously useful subjects like Salesforce and Slack.

E-learning has the answers

Why crochet and beer brewing? Partly because learning fun things is an employee perk, and spreads a sense of goodwill. And partly because once they get the learning habit, employees will find it hard to break. You probably don’t need an in-house beer brewer, but employees who continually learn new skills will perfect their learning style, accept upskilling as a natural part of work, and take new concepts on board more easily.

What makes this pick ‘n’ mix attitude to on-the-job education possible is the rise of e-learning. Taking courses online is cost-effective for businesses, and lets staff work at their own pace and in their own way.

Good online courses now mix interactive elements and video lessons with practical tasks and even virtual tutor-led sessions to ensure learning is fun and effective. The days when e-learning largely consisted of reading dry text and answering multiple choice questions is long gone. It’s now a sophisticated and omnichannel experience, utilising the best communication methods in any situation.

Is e-learning enough on its own? The global education experiment of Covid suggests it’s great for some students, while for others it’s best as part of a wider mix which includes face-to-face sessions.

That’s true of school and college students, and probably true of your workforce too. Some will be happy with e-learning alone. Others will procrastinate and become frustrated if help is not readily available. Older generations especially may prefer more traditional approaches. When important new work skills are involved, mix e-learning modules with some on-site teaching.

The foundations of learning

But the e-learning revolution is clearly here to stay. Businesses can use it to help impart new skills, and also offer it as a work perk and a way to instill a culture of lifelong learning. That culture will, in turn, facilitate the speedier uptake of new technology and novel ways of working.

Choose an e-learning provider based on the courses it offers and their relevance to your staff, as well the learning style of your workforce. But think beyond hard skills to courses that foster collaboration, communication and creative problem solving, as well as being fun. If possible, choose some courses that teams can take together.

After that, the only thing you really need to start adopting e-learning is the infrastructure to support it. More than anything, that means adequate internet bandwidth and the kind of cloud-based unified communications that offer anywhere access to talk, chat and video tools. In both cases, Vaioni is happy to help.

In uncertain times, and few have been more uncertain than this, businesses naturally look to manage costs. That’s easy to understand. The pandemic has proved the value of having cash in the bank. Organisations that are fighting to recover from Covid need to bring in revenue while limiting outlay.

The good news in all this is that the right business communications technology can help you do both.

Traditional telephony costs

The first thing to remember is that traditional phone systems can be expensive. On-site equipment breaks. It requires maintenance and monitoring, and often the ongoing costs associated with an expensive maintenance contract. It has to be housed, cooled and protected – digitally and physically. Both on-site PBX equipment and handsets have to be replaced when they reach end of life.

On top of that, on-premise is inflexible. Many companies with traditional telephone systems invest in spare capacity they don’t use, just in case a sudden spike in demand forces them to add new seats quickly. Handsets have to be purchased for every user or prospective user.

Replacing one on-premise solution with another requires a significant upfront investment, and a long-term commitment. Many traditional communications systems don’t come with all the features and functionality a modern business needs, requiring added investment in third party tools to fill the gaps. If a new money-saving feature emerges down the line, an owned on-premise solution won’t necessarily support it.

And perhaps most important of all, traditional telephony risks incurring the indirect and significant costs associated with lost productivity. Cloud-based systems let workers switch instantly to remote working with no disruption to business. On-premises systems are much less flexible. The pandemic has shown that business continuity planning benefits immensely from hosted communications. That’s true whether the disruption comes from a once-in-a-lifetime health crisis or more common threats like fire, flood, theft or cybercrime.

The hosted voice difference

A good hosted voice solution lets your staff work from anywhere, on any device, at short notice. It gives them everything they need in one complete package. With Vaioni’s new Clear Voice service, for example, standard call management features and unified communications tools are included from the outset – no third-party add-ons required. Updates to features and functionality are included in the cost, so your system never needs replacing.

And crucially, costs are predictable and manageable. There’s no on-premise equipment so no CapEx outlay and no ongoing maintenance costs. A cloud-based communications service frees up both office space and manpower.

Specific to Clear Voice is our low-cost per-user-per-month charging model, which ensures that there are no surprises when it comes to billing. Cloud based systems scale quickly and easily, so you can add licenses when you need them and take them away when you don’t. With Clear Voice, you never pay for capacity you don’t use.

The productivity benefits of hosted voice

Hosted voice also offers productivity benefits that have a direct and immediate impact on the bottom line.

With Clear Voice, rich data and analytics help you keep on top of staff productivity, even with a remote workforce. Clear Voice allows managers to monitor efficiency and productivity at individual employee level.

The solution’s rich feature set also includes unlimited IVRs, to help businesses effectively manage inbound calls with minimal switchboard staff. The Clear Voice mobile app means employees in every department can remain productive even if they’re not at their desks.

Clear Voice gets the balance right

Good businesses tread a fine line between managing costs and equipping themselves with the tools they need to create excellent customer experiences that ultimately drive sales and profit.

In the communications arena, Clear Voice gets the balance right. It’s a cost-effective, feature rich alternative to both on-premise telephony and other hosted voice services currently in the market.

Lower cost is achieved without compromise. Clear Voice offers the same ‘work anywhere’ functionality, easy scalability and speedy deployment as much pricier counterparts. By giving staff a complete communications solution that they can access from anywhere and on any device, it opens up potential cost savings from new hybrid working models and BYOD.

Clear Voice includes features that allow remote staff to collaborate, including video calls and integration with Microsoft Teams and Office 365. Collaboration is the key to better, more effective work.

And it gives those employees the means to create rich, meaningful customer experiences. Automatic call routing directs customers to the right contact at the first attempt. Calls are recorded, stored and ordered chronologically to ensure relevant compliance regulations are always met. Call management features like Hunt Groups and Wallboards come as standard too.

Hosted voice helps businesses to become agile, by making cloud-based communications part of a broader digital transformation strategy. It also allows businesses to equip remote and office-based staff with professional unified communications at manageable cost.

Clear Voice from Vaioni is the ideal hosted voice service. It drives productivity and manages costs predictably with its pay-as-you-go model. Businesses need to equip themselves for the realities of post-lockdown life. Clear Voice lets you do so without undue strain on pinched budgets.