Business cloud solutions have grown into immensely powerful tools for communicating, often bringing together several tools, including social media, live chat and email, into one platform.
Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) are easy to use, integrated systems that enable this communication to take place seamlessly, wherever the user happens to be. CCaaS solutions focus on customer interactions, while UCaaS is mainly used for internal communication and collaboration.
So, what exactly are CCaaS and UCaaS?
CCaaS – customer-focused contact centre service
A CcaaS solution provides your business with the means to run a virtual contact centre wherever you are. Everything is cloud based – so it doesn’t matter if teams are at home, in the office or working remotely – it works seamlessly in all situations. CCaaS focuses on providing your employees with access to all the information and tools they need to handle customer interactions. If a customer has communicated across several platforms – for example, by emailing and then tweeting to follow up, the system integrates all of these into one profile so that you can see all interactions in one place.
UCaaS – internal collaboration and communication tools
A UcaaS platform connect people in your company to each other via a diverse range of business applications. Bringing these together can greatly improve how your employees interact with each other, driving collaboration, efficiency and productivity. The six traditional primary functions of UCaaS programs are:
- Voice and telephone service
- Meeting solutions
- Messaging
- Instant messaging and presence
- Desktop clients and browser clients
- Communications-enabled applications
By bundling these technologies into one platform, users can interact through a “single pane of glass”. It means there’s no expensive hardware to install, minimises the time spent switching being applications and makes life easier for IT teams, as there is only one platform then to manage.
Our teams direct routing solution Connect4Teams is a good example of this. It’s a suite of services, delivering telephony and enhanced capabilities into Microsoft Teams.
The Connect4Teams service sits within our OneCloud platform, which has been designed to support all customer needs, whether you have an existing telephony service (on-premise or cloud) or if you are looking to implement something completely new.
From a Contact Centre perspective, we have the ability of incorporating modern cloud contact centre solutions within our Connect4Teams service offering, delivering a single and consistent user experience within Microsoft teams, regardless of being a back office user or a front office (contact centre) user.
Here are the top five benefits of moving your contact centre to the cloud.
Reduced costs
Cloud-based communications solutions come with a single bill to plan for at the end of each month or year, making them ideal for financial planning. Users only pay for the functionality they need, with minimal on-site maintenance costs.
Rather than piecing together phone services, conferencing solutions and video applications, business get all these services from one platform and in one invoice.
Combining UCaaS and CCaaS also means that you can improve the productivity and performance of your teams, which also leads to better earnings and stronger connections with customers, on a lower budget.
Integration
Integrating your UCaaS and CCaaS into critical applications, such as CRM or ERP, leverages further benefits, such as data analytics tools, IoT automations, and AI algorithms with minimal complexity.
Combining these environments means you don’t have to worry about installing the same integrated technology in different parts of your communication stack, nor about making sure they sync correctly.
When logged into UCaaS or CCaaS, all members of staff will be able to easily access the same valuable technology.
Reporting
Data reporting is crucial to any successful company, especially in the modern communications landscape. Providing useful insights into customer preferences, data helps you provide a better quality of service.
The data from your combined UCaaS and CCaaS environments helps your organisation’s management team make informed choices with insights from data across all employee and customer interactions.
This can be particularly helpful to make better assumptions about how back-end employee behavior prompts an increase in retention and customer satisfaction, and is helpful in remote or hybrid working environments, where supervisors can’t always check in on how agents are doing.
Improved customer experience
People expect fast service alongside a seamless customer experience, so if they are asked to repeatedly identify themselves or are forwarded to another number, this can cause frustrations.
UcaaS/CCaaS integration is particularly useful where callers must be authenticated, and interactions need to be recorded and logged for compliance. With integration, callers only need to be authenticated once, even if they’re routed from one location to another.
At the same time, agents can send information about the customer to the new agent, so the client doesn’t have to explain everything again. This means the problem is likely to be addressed with speed, streamlining the customer interaction and improving their experience.
Stronger backend collaboration
When all aspects of the business are properly aligned, it becomes much easier for productivity to thrive. Using UcaaS, contact centre staff can easily collaborate, sharing insights and information.
For example, if a customer calls into a contact centre with a product question the agent can’t answer, the agent can view a company directory in UcaaS, check employee statuses to see who’s available, and start a chat with that internal expert who can give them instant answers.
If the subject requires further discussion, the agent can route the customer directly to the expert’s phone.
Onecom’s cutting-edge OneCloud solution is an example of UcaaS and CcaaS technology. It covers everything you need to keep your people connected, from one-click integrations to cloud telephony and collaboration tools, all from a single, cloud-based platform. To find out more about OneCloud and the services we provide, see our website at https://www.onecom.co.uk/onecloud for details.