Today’s business leaders are constantly searching for ways to improve operational efficiency, build revenue, and outperform the competition, while keeping costs low. To achieve their goals, they need tools that unify their employees, align strategic initiatives, and help them deliver great experiences.
Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solutions have become a critical resource for enhancing collaboration, and keeping teams synchronized. Tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and many others bridge the gaps between employees, even in a hybrid or remote workplace.
However, while UCaaS platforms deliver incredible advantages to businesses on their own, their value can increase significantly when they’re aligned with tools that allow organizations to manage and enhance customer experiences.
As a result, UCaaS players searching for ways to differentiate their offerings and elevate their value, are beginning to consolidate UCaaS and CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) tools.
The Benefits of Infusing UCaaS with CCaaS Tools
Where UCaaS solutions focus on aligning teams and boosting productivity, CCaaS systems give organizations a cloud-based environment where they can manage customer interactions through various channels, from phone and email, to chat and social media.
Just as demand for UCaaS has grown as companies look for ways to empower and optimize their teams, interest in CCaaS has increased as companies recognize the value of delivering aligned, scalable, and agile customer experiences.
While companies can access these two solutions separately, the convergence of CCaaS and UCaaS is becoming more attractive due to various factors. The adoption of cloud-based solutions, the evolving demands of customers, and the evolution of remote work has led to an environment where UCaaS and CCaaS need to be aligned. In fact, more than 95% of businesses believe integrating UCaaS and CCaaS is crucial to future success.
According to Michael McCloskey, CEO of Bright Pattern:
“Bright Pattern is integrated into many UCaaS solutions, providing a superior experience between knowledge workers and contact center agents. This has added a new revenue opportunity for our UCaaS partners as well as provided differentiation from their competitors.”
Here are just four of the core reasons CCaaS could be a growth lever for UCaaS players.
A Simple Alignment Significantly Enhances Business Outcomes
As cloud-based solutions for communication, both UCaaS and CCaaS platforms are usually highly flexible. Increasingly, vendors are making their UCaaS platforms more flexible, opening the door for API connections and straightforward integrations with contact center technologies.
This means businesses can more easily create a unified communications environment that enables greater collaboration, improved productivity, and enhanced customer experiences.
When UCaaS and CCaaS solutions are aligned, contact center agents and back-end team members can easily share data and insights, support each other on various tasks, and work collaboratively on improving customer satisfaction.
Sales teams can rapidly transfer calls to other team members, business leaders can retain a comprehensive view of the organization and customer journey, and teams benefit from an aligned ecosystem. In fact, aligning contact center and UC technology can significantly reduce the risk of context switching in the workplace, boosting productivity by reducing the number of tabs and tools staff members need to toggle between each day.
UCaaS and CCaaS Integration Improves Customer Experiences
Improving customer experience isn’t just a necessity for preserving your brand’s reputation in the modern world. Studies show that customers who have good experiences with companies spend 140% more than their peers, increasing your revenue potential.
However, delivering excellent customer experience requires internal alignment. A Salesforce study found 76% of customers expect consistent and streamlined interactions across all departments. However, 54% believe that sales, service, and marketing teams don’t share enough information.
Vendors who align CCaaS and UCaaS technologies give companies the opportunity to reduce the silos in their workplaces. Agents get a variety of tools they can use to interact with customers, and also access assistance and support from their team members.
This means companies can take a holistic approach to increasing customer engagement, converting buyers, and retaining loyal consumers in the long-term.
CCaaS Helps to Reduce Business Costs
While most companies now know a comprehensive strategy for delivering excellent customer experiences is essential to their long-term growth and success, a difficult economic environment means many organizations are striving to accomplish more with less.
Combining cloud-based solutions for customer experience, and team collaboration, can help companies to reduce operational costs in a range of ways. First, cloud-based technologies are generally less expensive to implement and maintain than on-premises technology.
Additionally, one report found integrating CCaaS and UCaaS can reduce call handling times by up to 45%, leading to a more productive and efficient workflows, and reducing operational costs. Combining CCaaS and UCaaS can also enable hybrid and remote work, reducing the need to hire in-house staff, and minimize maintenance costs.
CCaaS and UCaaS Deliver Comprehensive Business Insights
Another way adding CCaaS to UCaaS environments helps to reduce operational costs, and improve business performance, is by giving companies a more holistic view of their ecosystem. While individually, both UCaaS and CCaaS tools can deliver valuable insights into employee behavior and customer experience, aligning the two platforms allows for deeper analysis.
Companies can see the link between their resource allocation strategy, their team members’ performance, and the impact on customer satisfaction rates. They can learn more about the customer journey, and implement comprehensive strategies for boosting loyalty and retention.
Some solutions can even leverage AI to bridge the gaps between different data points, and help companies make better decisions about how to allocate resources and budget. What’s more, this comprehensive overview into the business and customer service environment can also assist organizations with adhering to compliance and security guidelines.
The fewer data silos there are in a company, caused by disparate tools, the fewer risks that organization will be exposed to.
Bringing the Value of CCaaS to the UCaaS Landscape
As demand for agile cloud-based solutions for communications continues to grow, companies are rapidly seeing the benefits of aligning their technology stacks. Converging UCaaS and CCaaS into a single solution gives businesses the power to unlock higher levels of productivity, deliver better customer experiences, and even reduce operational costs.
For vendors looking to differentiate themselves in the thriving UCaaS space, implementing contact center technologies could be the ideal way to bring more value to organizations and end users. Together, UCaaS and CCaaS give companies the holistic platform they need to thrive in the competitive modern world.
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