Cloud Communications: A UK Business Buyer's Guide

Why every UK business is now on cloud telephony

The UK's ISDN switch-off has accelerated the move from on-premise PBXs to cloud-hosted communications. For most businesses this is a net upgrade: lower hardware cost, easier multi-site deployment, integration with CRM and Microsoft 365, and the ability to layer modern features like AI call summaries and intelligent routing.

The decision now is not whether to move to cloud, but which platform, which features, and how to migrate without disrupting customers. Done well, a migration is invisible to the people who call you. Done badly, it can dent customer experience for months.

What to look for in a cloud phone system

Beyond core call handling, there are seven capabilities that distinguish a genuinely modern cloud phone system from a re-skinned legacy product.

• Native CRM integration - calls logged automatically against the right contact and account
• Microsoft Teams integration - direct routing so Teams becomes the soft phone for users who want it
• AI call summaries - automatic, structured notes pushed back into CRM or the ticket system
• Intelligent routing - skills-based, time-based and overflow routing without legacy menu trees
• Real-time and historical analytics - wait times, missed calls, peak hours, agent performance
• Resilient architecture - geographically distributed, with automatic failover
• UK number portability - keep every number you currently use

SelectVoice: Telappliant's cloud phone platform

SelectVoice is Telappliant's UK-hosted cloud phone platform. It combines the standard cloud telephony feature set with AI capabilities (summaries, transcription, routing, virtual assistant via Ella) and tight integration with Microsoft Teams and the major UK CRMs.

It is the right answer for UK businesses between 10 and 500 users that want a single supplier for telephony, AI features and managed support, with UK-based people accountable end to end.

Migration without disruption

A clean migration follows the same pattern every time: discovery, parallel build, pilot group, controlled cutover, decommission. Each stage has a defined exit criterion. Skipping stages causes the disruption that gives cloud telephony migrations a bad reputation.

Telappliant's typical timeline is six to eight weeks for a 50-user business, eight to twelve weeks for a 200-user multi-site rollout. Numbers are ported in tranches so any porting issue affects only a small group at a time.

Microsoft Teams Direct Routing: a special case

For businesses standardised on Microsoft Teams, Direct Routing lets Teams act as the user's phone, with calls flowing through a SIP trunk from a UK provider like Telappliant. It removes the need for separate softphones, gives users a single application for chat, meetings and calls, and integrates naturally with Microsoft 365.

Direct Routing isn't right for every business - contact-centre operations often need richer routing and reporting than Teams provides natively - but it's a strong fit for knowledge-worker organisations whose call volumes are moderate and whose primary collaboration tool is already Teams.

Layering AI on top of cloud comms

Cloud telephony is the foundation. AI is the layer on top. Done in that order, AI features pay back quickly: automatic call summaries, missed-call recovery, AI receptionist for out-of-hours, and intelligent routing all sit cleanly on a modern cloud platform.

Trying to add AI to an ageing on-premise PBX is rarely worthwhile - the integration cost usually exceeds the cost of migrating to a modern platform that has AI built in.

Next steps with Telappliant

Our free phone system review is a no-obligation look at your current platform, numbers, call flows and feature gaps, with a plain-English written summary. From there, our team can scope, quote and deliver a migration end to end.

Frequently asked questions