Top 6 reasons for integrating UCaaS and CCaaS in 2023
5 min
In today’s ever-evolving economic landscape, it is increasingly important for business leaders to ensure that their companies are capable of staying connected — with their customers and with each other. Many businesses have begun integrating Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) with Contact Centres as a Service (CCaaS) to boost their communications functionality. Rather than choosing one or the other, leveraging both allows businesses to optimize the customer experience regarding communicating with their brand.
If you are not currently implementing a similar strategy, it may be helpful to understand exactly what UCaaS and CCaaS platforms have to offer. We will start there, then get into the top six reasons your business should integrate both.
What is UCaaS?
When organizations must consolidate communications applications across their entire enterprise, UCaaS tools often prove essential. These Unified Communications as a Service tools are purchased as comprehensive solutions that providers package together. The intent behind these solutions is to offer companies the ability to minimize the complexity of business communications without developing their own distinct Unified Communications infrastructure.
- Several communication functions can be supported through UCaaS, including:
- Enterprise telephony (inbound/outbound calling)
- Unified messaging
- Instant messaging (internal and external)
- Mobility communications
There are also two primary architectures that can be leveraged through UCaaS.
Single-Tenancy
A single-tenancy approach allows customers to integrate their communications resources with applications located on their premises. This is more secure and reliable than the alternative, as customer data is not exposed to the business’ customers. With a single tenancy instance of UCaaS implemented, there is no need to worry about customer data being impacted if the customer’s software platform fails.
Because single tenancy approaches offer more reliability and greater security, expect them to come at greater costs than the alternative option, multi-tenancy solutions.
Multi-Tenancy
If your company incorporates a multi-tenant UCaaS infrastructure, your business and its customers will share a single, customized software platform. This is the more cost-effective solution, as costs are reduced significantly by outsourcing the hosting of the software instance to the UCaaS provider’s local data center. Because they are hosting the software, the provider also handles any software upgrades and support.
Multi-tenant infrastructure is less costly but also less customizable. This is the best route for your company if you place affordability over flexibility.
What is CCaaS?
CCaaS stands for Contact Center as a Service. This is a common cloud service offering that allows businesses to integrate essential contact center capabilities. CCaaS providers offer their customers access to tools and infrastructure that they can use to route inbound customer interactions to one of their own call center agents.
CCaaS features several useful functions, including:
Automatic Contact Distributor
A CCaaS system may offer automatic contact distribution, which manages a queue for various interactions. Some of these interactions include messaging, voice, and self-service AI. When callers engage in these interactions, the contact distributor is capable of using the context of their previous interactions to determine where their future calls and other interactions should be directed.
Interactive Voice Response
This is an interactive voice menu that allows callers to choose directly what type of interaction they are looking for when they call. Then, the system allows them to complete basic tasks without needing an actual call center agent to pick up the phone. Callers simply answer questions using their voice or numbered responses. Likely examples where Interactive Voice Response scenarios make sense include paying bills or making queries into user accounts.
Outbound Dialers
CCaaS platforms can also equip customers with outbound calling capabilities. Amongst these capabilities is proactive outreach directly to customers, which can be greatly improved through automated or predictive dialing systems. With a modern predictive dialer, agents can connect with potential customers at higher rates and limit wasted time.
Should You Integrate UCaaS and CCaaS?
Yes, integrating UCaaS and CCaaS solutions is a popular trend that has gained relevance for a good reason! Here are several key reasons you should integrate your UCaaS and CCaaS platforms.
Reason 1. Improved Cross-Function Collaboration Capacity
It’s best to empower your company and its team members to approach running the business as a unified effort. Having CCaaS capabilities allows companies to capture feedback and analyze pain points that are slowing down their communications workflow. In addition, UCaaS infrastructure will offer them more opportunities to share this knowledge and collaborate alongside other departments.
Reason 2. Share Knowledge Across Your Organization
The ability to share content across your organization has become incredibly valuable in recent years. When you equip your team to share knowledge with one another, you promote internal process improvements. With a UCaaS solution in place, you can enable your team to share a variety of different communications, including video, audio, documents, and more!
A great example can be shown through a contact center that collaborates with a sales support team. If the contact center has access to internal documents that are designed to help customers understand a specific design issue, those documents could theoretically be shared through the UCaaS system. With the internal documents in hand, the sales support team can work to create solutions that allow contact center agents to better address the flaws during their calls.
Reason 3. Integrate Diverse AI Tools
Artificial intelligence-based tools are becoming more popular year over year. You can access a suite of tools that will supplement performance throughout your business by investing in UCaaS and CCaaS tools. The AI tools come in a variety of forms, such as Einstein Call Coaching, or other agent-assistance tools.
These tools open up opportunities for agents and other employees to innovate in the way they interact with their workplace responsibilities. With tools like image recognition and other custom tools, your team can streamline certain processes and make communication more interactive than ever. If you’re ready to try what Einstein can do for you, make sure you read these tips to Successfully Deploy Einstein Call Coaching in Salesforce.
Reason 4. Improve Customer Experiences
The customer experience you provide your customers should be of the utmost importance to you. Quality customer experiences tend to start with good teams. But when those strong teams are equipped with appropriate tools, they have better capacity to offer the ideal experience for their customers.
When people reach out to a business via their contact center, they typically search for some combination of support, guidance, and instruction. If they are able to reach your team, great. But who they meet, how they meet them, and what happens after they meet are all key components of the customer experience.
Integrating CCaaS and UCaaS will allow your business to ensure that customers reach the right person whenever they call. And if they do not need to speak directly to a person, the systems will allow them to still maintain a positive experience without interacting directly with any people.
For example, if you have both systems integrated, and a client calls one of your salespeople, the system could provide the person who receives the call with all of the information they need to route the customer directly to a sales support agent who is well-informed on the product that customer is interested in. You can also direct information about this customer to anyone else who may need it. This cuts out steps that would otherwise need to be taken several times over.
Reason 5. Improved Analytics
Without data, you will struggle to run a modern business. In the modern communications world, analyzing data has become easier than ever. Using the data analytics you process, you can gain useful insights that allow you to see deeper into customer preferences. This knowledge can improve your company’s ability to provide high levels of service that customers are actually happy with.
Through your UCaaS infrastructure, you can learn more about how each team member is staying productive. This is useful if you are operating a remote workforce or have some work-from-home employees on staff. If supervisors cannot always check in on how each agent is doing, your UCaaS infrastructure will provide details about basic metrics that could be useful.
The data analytics options enabled by UCaaS and CCaaS infrastructure make it easier to assume how back-end processes should be organized to produce optimal results. By combining your entire communications stack, you can analyze and leverage insights with minimal steps.
Reason 6. Maximize Agility in Your Business
More businesses are operating remote or hybrid workforces than ever. This means employers often need to roll out new technologies that reach employees where they are working. With integrated UCaaS and CCaaS, the technology can be implemented through another provider. This keeps you from needing to perform constant updates on employee computers and provide new software directly.
Through these cloud platforms, the tools are all updated by the provider — not you. This gives you the agility you need to keep your business growing in a positive direction. Whenever new challenges arise, you can simply address it from a distance using your CCaaS and UCaaS providers’ tools.
Your CCaaS Solution
There are endless UCaaS and CCaaS solutions on the market. Unfortunately, many of them require you to spend money to try out their products. Fortunately, PhoneIQ offers a free trial for their CCaaS solution. This means you can determine whether their product is a good fit for your organization before you spend a dime!
This reduces the risk and allows users to experience our product in action! To learn more, use the contact form on this page. One of our representatives will get back to you shortly.
.png)
