Why Combining UCaaS and CCaaS Is Great for Business

Your contact center should offer more than simple answers. It’s the mothership of your customer experience, but its processes require integrations for optimal performance. A unified communication platform can empower collaboration between your contact center and the organization to provide a more seamless customer experience. But why? 

Unified communications as a service (UCaaS) can be combined with a contact center as a service(CCaaS) to improve the customer experience at large. Before diving into exactly how these improvements occur, it’s important to understand exactly what UCaaS and CCaaS are in your organization.

UCaaS and Contact Center as a Service: The Basics

While both UCaaS and CCaaS provide essential functions for your operation, they have distinct differences in how they accomplish results.

  • UCaaS: a cloud-based business collaboration solution that consolidates various communication channels such as video, voice, messaging, and presence on a unified platform.
  • CCaaS: an advanced cloud-based call center tool for empowering a business’s omnichannel customer communication, whether it be by phone, SMS, online chat, or email.

At a glance, you can think of UCaaS as an internal resource for improving communication and CCaaS as a way to bolster external communication with the customer.

The emergence of online resources for call centers revolutionized contact centers — creating contact centers as services to benefit the entirety of the customer journey. This prompted companies to adopt new ways to communicate externally and internally — but all too often, businesses are lagging behind in one of these departments.

Better Together: Why Unify UCaaS and CCaaS?

Combining your UCaaS and CCaaS offers a plethora of unique benefits.

Besides the avoidance of integration headaches when working with multiple companies, there are also cost advantages. Minimizing administrative burden frees up IT staff to focus on core competencies and strategic opportunities. Additionally, you can avoid weighty upfront capital outlays because a contact center as a service is a more predictable cost structure that centers around regular recurring operating expenditures.

1. Access to Information

Contact center employees gain seamless access to contextual information regarding a customer, allowing them to spend more time addressing the problem rather than familiarizing themselves with a customer’s situation or past interactions with the business.

As a customer, this is a huge plus in the customer experience department. Nothing is more frustrating than contacting a contact center for the second or third time and being forced to re-explain the predicament.

2. Meet Customers on Preferred Platforms

Another benefit of combining UCaaS and CCaaS is the ability to readily access and communicate engagement data with these platforms. This data provides valuable insights to where and when a customer engages with your company — whether it be on their phone, SMS, chat, email, and beyond.

Your contact center agents can leverage this data to easily communicate with customers on their preferred platform or device to better the customer experience and provide satisfying services faster.

3. Less Stress on Your Team

Learning new systems can inevitably slow operations and create workflow issues — especially when there are more multiple platforms to familiarize oneself with. Employees have enough on their plate when juggling multiple contact center customers — and keeping mental tabs on platform differences can inevitably affect performance.

Mitigating frustrations with your team is difficult to measure, but it can have an immense effect on the customer experience. Making the lives of your employees simpler and less confusing with combined UCaaS and CCaaS systems will certainly improve work satisfaction and in turn — customer satisfaction.

4. Seamless Coordination

Contact center agents can leverage collaboration tools within the UCaaS to harness rapid answers to inquiries that provide a fast and reliable resolution. Even on their own, contact centers as a service offer incredible business benefits. But, combining these external communication systems with your internal contact center as a service platform allows seamless coordination to handle problems efficiently and quickly.

5. Combined Analytics

Contact center data is a treasure-trove of vital information that can help to improve the customer experience and create advocates for your company. Unified analytics offer a comprehensive view of your business communications along with vital customer engagement systems.

As a business leader, you can highlight ways to adjust the customer experience in meaningful ways — creating a more valuable omnichannel approach.

Enhance Communication Stack By Combining UCaaS and CCaaS

Today, moving communication to the cloud is a must. It’s a flexible environment capable of pushing companies forward and creating new opportunities for collaboration, productivity, and an enhanced customer experience.

  • Strengthen Your Data Access: Gain visibility on the entire spectrum of your customer journey along with your business process in a unified platform. Improve decision-making, give employees more accessibility, and enhance your analytics across the board.
  • Unmatched Collaboration: Ease communication and collaboration between contact center agents and specialists, internal department heads, and vital sources for a more unified environment. Remove siloes to solve customer problems faster and create a landscape that facilitates sales opportunities.
  • Quick Integrations: The cloud makes implementing new tools, artificial intelligence (AI), and automation easier than ever before.
  • Boost Customer Experience: Combining UCaaS and CCaaS systems allows agents to work together more effectively, and engage with customers faster and smarter than ever. Additionally, agents can view the entire customer journey from a birds-eye view, easing pain points and providing solutions along the way.
  • Cost Reduction: Unifying these systems means less maintenance and less hassle — allowing IT specialists more time to focus on improving processes.

Supercharge your company’s communication stack and improve customer experience across the board by combining your UCaaS and CCaaS systems. Give agents, IT leaders, and even customers the resources needed to grow your business and boost sales today. Cost Reduction:

Twin Cities Phone Systems: Connect With Those Who Matter

Integrated Communications cares about one thing – connections. We’re experts in connecting the people, communities and businesses of the Twin Cities through telecommunication services. We’ll help you setup phone systems and VoIP services to increase efficiency and lower costs with the best technology available.

We’re also experts in connecting with our customers. We’ll  be there for you through every step of the installation process and for subsequent contract renewals. We supply our phone system products throughout the Twin Cities suburbs and strive to address the needs of each of our clients in a hurry, but with a smile.

We offer four different access types to deliver our VoIP services – and either hardware-based or software-based phone systems to our customers. From easy to complex, from low-cost to high-end and everything in between, we have access to countless products and services. We will make our recommendations based on your connectivity and affordability needs. And with 20+ years in the business, we guarantee those recommendations will be spot-on

Throughout Lakeville, Integrated Communications provides optimized VoIP services and business phone systems to several companies throughout the area. If you’re in need of a new system, an update to an old one or if you’re unsure about what exactly you need – we will offer our free consulting services to figure it out.

We also serve those small businesses in Woodbury who are looking to set up conferencing services. Integrated Com has teamed up with a national leader in conferencing solutions – Dialogue – to bring you the luxuries of constant connectivity to your fingertips. Our partnership is built on trust and methods proven to improve your phone system abilities and of course, save you some cash.

We provide expert recommendations when hooking up your Twin Cities phone systems. With over two decades in the industry, we will connect you locally or long distance, we will hook up one phone or 100. Whatever your phone system needs are, call Integrated Communications today to get started with a solution.

 

Three Reasons Why the Business Telephone is More Important Than Ever

More companies than ever are using VOIP (voice over internet protocol) or allowing employees to “bring your own device” and use smartphones on the job. With options like this at the disposal of an organization, is there a need for standard business phone systems any longer? Actually, a regular telephone line is still an important investment for most businesses. Consider these three reasons why having a business phone service is important for your organization.

Business Phone Systems Offer Quality – While smartphones and internet telephone options are convenient and often affordable, the audio quality does not compare to the quality of a standard business phone service. This is important if you use the phone to conduct business internationally–it can be very difficult to understand the other person talking if the line is not clear.

These Systems are Secure – When you are in a business that deals with confidential information, you want to protect the integrity of the data you share by phone. A quality business phone system is easier to secure and protect against wiretapping devices than a simple cellular phone.

A Business Phone Service Grows With You – Even if your company is on the small side right now, choosing a good system will allow you to expand it as the company grows. Right now you may only need a line or two, but these systems can be expanded to allow for dozens of lines across multiple locations.

These reasons are only the beginning. Having a “landline” phone for your business may not be one of the latest trends in technology, but it is an important way to make sure your company operates at the top of its game. Finding a company that can provide business phone systems, as well as a full-scale internet solution is a great option for the business owner who wants to save time, money and effort while he or she puts a company-wide communications plan together in or around Minneapolis or the Twin Cities in Minnesota.

Wireless Emergency Alerts Ensures Better Community Protection

The Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) system , also known as Commercial Mobile Alerts, allows federal agencies to aggregate alert messages from the President, the National Weather Service (NWS) and emergency operations centers . Alerts are then transmitted to wireless providers, who distribute them to their customers’ cell phones via Cell Broadcast, a technology similar to SMS text messaging.

The three types of alerts delivered using this system are:

  1. Alerts issued by the President
  2. Alerts of imminent threats to life and safety
  3. AMBER Alerts

wireless emergency alerts

FEMA joined the FCC and the cellular industry on the Personal Localized Alert Network (PLAN) formulating the technology that actually transmits alerts to cell phones.

As part of the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS), aggregators convert original messages to mobile phone format for distribution over networks to customers.

FEMA Wireless Emergency Alerts notify citizens about imminent threats via their mobile devices. Under normal conditions, text and phone messages from cell phones are impacted when there is congestion. That is why special technology is required for critical and lifesaving alerts to get through. Location-based messages are sent with information relevant to a cell phone subscriber’s locale, a service that’s free for emergency managers.

TeleCommunication Systems, Inc. provides secure and reliable mobile communications technology. Fielding solutions in E9-1-1, text messaging, commercial location and deployable wireless communications, Telecommunication Systems, Inc. is a leading mobile cloud services provider. It supports applications spanning the gamut from navigation and asset tracking through telematics. Government agencies incorporate the company’s state-of-the-art cyber security and deployable satellite solutions within the core of their critical mobile communications systems.

To date Wireless Emergency Alerts have helped Colorado residents receive alerts about local flooding and hazardous road conditions. Minneapolis, MN residents helped facilitate a safe and speed recovery of an abducted child with these emergency mobile alerts. In East Windsor, CT, a WEA alert contributed to saving the lives of a camp counselor and her students . In Elmira, NY, an impending tornado threatened municipal residents, but a WEA alert helped them reach safety.