In this era of steady digitisation across industries, cloud-based solutions like UCaaS and CCaaS have gained much-deserved prominence.
These services offer a host of benefits while being cheaper to operate and maintain. Before we delve deeper into this set of comparisons, let us take a look at what exactly the two terms mean.
What are UCaaS solutions?
If we turn our gaze away from all the communication that businesses do externally, with their customers, suppliers etc.—one would notice that businesses deal with a huge amount of internal communication too. Any organisation ultimately is an amalgamation of all its employees working towards a common goal. These employees have a large amount of communication and collaboration needs.
Earlier, these needs would be served at an interpersonal level by using text messages or calling or sometimes even productivity software. But these are all sharply distinct platforms with no scope of integration and collaborations between them. This can add a barrier to steady functioning and growth of the company.
Unified Communications as a Service, or UCaaS, is exactly the service which helps solve all these issues. The general construct here is that all of the disparate communication tools used by businesses for internal communications are integrated thoroughly by UCaaS on a single platform.
It functions as an advanced, cloud-based service which allows for unlimited communication and collaboration within an organisation hence driving massive efficiency gains for the business.
Financially speaking, organisations no longer need to purchase different services from multiple vendors anymore. They can simply opt for a UCaaS platform from a single vendor and get everything up and running in no time without the need for an extensive internal IT team.
What are CCaaS Solutions?
CCaaS stands for Contact Center as a Service. It is a cloud-based, digital contact center service with a range of capabilities. How it differs from UCaaS—while UCaaS solutions focus mostly on internal communications, CCaaS solutions are wholly oriented towards external communications and customer engagement.
It also offers a whole set of features including seamless integration with Customer Relation Management (CRM) technologies. Additionally, CCaaS solutions allow businesses to build contact center capabilities in a gradual, steady manner without costly capital investments on infrastructural setup.
A play on the same is cloud phone systems, which are designed to revolutionise business communications. This system can open up an organisation to a number of different opportunities for customer relationship building, relationship management, and more.
These solutions are usually deployed by IT departments to modernize legacy, premise-based phone systems, and rapidly streamline internal workflows. They are also designed to support mobility, virtual work, dispersed workforce, and interoffice collaboration.
With advanced features like call routing plus forwarding, conferencing, virtual receptionist, voicemail to email transcriptions baked into the service, CCaaS thoroughly enables multichannel communications for business via a single cloud-based platform.
“The old rules of the game do not apply anymore. It’s a new world, an evolved market. Cloud-based phone systems can aid hugely in ensuring first-class consumer service and engagement each time and every time.”
Benefits of Integrating CCaaS and UCaaS solutions
Following are the five main ways in which integrating UCaaS and CCaaS solutions can result in a win-win for businesses and organisations.
1. Aids superior consumer experience
Businesses around the world are out to woo a completely evolved and transformed set of consumers today. Their demands from the brands have changed; as have their needs in terms of goods and services.
Customers today are vastly more empowered and informed. Owing to countries embracing the market-economy model, customers have a plethora of options and alternatives to choose from as well.
These fundamentally alter the way that brands need to operate and function. Legacy setups based on incapable platforms are no more up to the task. Cloud-based systems and solutions such as CCaaS and UCaaS remain the only sustainable and cost-effective options which allow for an organisation to service its multiplicity of needs and sustainably tackle evolving demands as well.
2. Allows for a reimagining of customer engagement
Legacy, premise-based internal communication, and contact center platforms are fundamentally separate by nature. However, UCaaS solutions and CCaaS solutions are cloud-based, modern, and technologically-flexible. They can be easily integrated and allow all organisations to become customer-facing. But, how?
Take this for an example: You run a software firm, and the contact center agent cannot resolve a customer’s issues. With UcaaS, the agent can now transfer the call to those with the right expertise inside the company, while staying connected with the customer, externally.
This opens a whole new world of troubleshooting for businesses and brands. A business can now engage with its customers in ways it couldn’t even have imagined earlier.
3. Massively cull back on duplication and wastage of resources
One of the most important things that UCaaS and CCaaS integration allows is immense efficiency gains. There are two ways it can do so.
First, all your employees can be customer-facing. It removes a number of duplications in terms of systems, human resources, processes etc. that you might have needed if UCaaS and CCaaS were not integrated.
Secondly, it eases the load and requirements for an in-house IT team! Once integrated, CCaaS and UCaaS are very easy to deploy, manage, run, and make use of. They’re easier to navigate for the end-users as well. Moreover, their cloud-based nature allows you to deploy these solutions at a pace that suits the organisation, starting off with a limited feature set or just for certain departments initially before scaling it up.
Importance of preparing for a post-COVID-19 world
COVID-19 has worked exactly like a time machine as far as elevating the urgency of deploying UCaaS and CCaaS solutions is concerned. For any business right now, there are just two main priorities: the flexibility of operations and conserving cash. The integration of UCaaS and CCaaS will definitively help in achieving both these aims.
Firstly, entire businesses relevant to the sector, say BPOs for example, have started remote work literally overnight. They’ve invented newer models like BYOD or Bring Your Own Device for their workers, for instance.
All of this essentially mandates that services like UCaaS and CCaaS be adopted wholesale, since premise-based solutions don’t even make sense here in the first place.
Secondly, a dispersed, cloud-based remote workforce massively expands the hiring pool for businesses and allows them to hire in small towns at much more competitive salaries as well. This helps ensure massive operational efficiencies throughout the setup.
UCaaS and CCaaS integration helps enable data integration as well
One of the biggest pain points for businesses and organisations of various sizes and scope has been the siloing of data. We know that businesses generate a huge amount of customer data every single minute of them operating.
But till date, it’s been quite a challenge for them to collect, organise, and make use of this data since owing to legacy systems, it all existed in silos within departments.
Now, with the integration of UCaaS and CCaaS solutions, this is now a possibility, leading to massive gains and newer analytical possibilities overall.
In the short run, integrated communications data implies that teams across departments and functions can operate on the same page. In the long run, it also allows the organisation to leverage sophisticated data analytical tools, IoT, AI, automation of certain processes etc.
There’s never been a better time to adopt these latest advances in technology, grow your business with Acefone, and develop a steady consumer base as well. UCaaS and CCaaS solutions will truly enable it all! Contact us today at 1888-859-0450.
Olivia is an outgoing person who enjoys writing, is an SEO enthusiast, and often interacts with others in intellectual conversations. She enjoys listening to music in her free time. Connect with her on Linkedin
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