UCAAS VS. CCAAS: WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

UCaaS vs. CCaaS: What’s the Difference?

Today, many businesses are struggling to stay afloat in the ever-changing world of cloud computing. While some aspects of this area can be challenging, business professionals must pay attention and consider what they need for their company’s needs.

For example, UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) and CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) have recently gained a lot of traction in the market.

While these two areas of cloud computing are often thought to be the same, there is a significant distinction that business professionals need to consider when choosing what services are suitable for their company’s needs. Read More

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:

3 Pivotal Benefits of UCaaS That Will Enhance Your Business

Numerous companies are changing the way they communicate internally each year. Businesses are seeking cost-effective and efficient solutions as technology continues to adapt. Most companies find success through unified communications as a service (UCaaS), and with all of the benefits UCaaS offers, it’s easy to understand why.

Are you interested in taking your business to the next level by streamlining internal communications? Read on to discover the top benefits of UCaaS that will enhance your business operations.

What is UCaaS?

As you read the term “UCaaS,” your mind may think of a similar acronym, “CCaaS” (Contact Center as a Service). The history of contact centers as a service is similar to unified communications as a service, but the two services are used for slightly different purposes. CCaaS handles customer communication through efficient call center services, live-chat help, and email communication.

The difference is that CCaaS deals with outbound customer communications, and UCaaS handles internal business communications. UCaaS offers helpful internal communication features such as:

  • Call routing and forwarding
  • Conference bridging
  • Instant messaging
  • Video conferencing
  • Virtual receptionists
  • Voicemail-to-email transcription
  • Fax-to-email transcription

The most impressive characteristic of UCaaS is that it consolidates a company’s enterprise communication applications into a single cloud-based platform. UCaaS solutions are designed to support flexibility and interdepartmental collaboration through modern, streamlined workflows. Typically, a business’s IT team purchases UCaaS solutions to improve internal communications.

3 Impressive Benefits of UCaaS

So, UCaaS accommodates internal communications, but why should businesses switch to UCaaS from their current operations? Is there that much of a difference? The answer is yes; UCaaS offers a plethora of exciting benefits for businesses. Let’s dive into three of them.

1. Remote Work Support

Ever since March of 2020, remote work has become normalized and preferred by many companies. Many employees prefer working from home because it offers added flexibility and accessible accommodations for people with particular health needs. Some people appreciate the flexibility as they raise children, and others value not making long commutes. Whatever your reason for operating remotely, it’s here to stay.

However, with remote work comes communication challenges. Collaboration, tracking tasks, and interacting with co-workers become difficult to execute in a remote setting. Thankfully, UCaaS solves a lot of issues that past communication systems couldn’t remedy.

UCaaS operates in the cloud, meaning all of your company’s virtual communication can occur whenever and wherever. UCaaS pulls this off by delivering video calling, document sharing, virtual meetings, chat rooms, and voice calling all through a single platform.

Your employees can even set up one phone number so people can reach them in the workplace and out in the field. This allows your employees to collaborate whether they’re in the office, at home, or a mix of the two.

2. Improved Efficiency

Every business owner knows the consequences of too much downtime. So every company is searching for ways to work faster and more efficiently. With UCaaS, business operations excel because blackouts and hard drive crashes become a thing of the past. Your team never has to miss a beat because even if one communication channel goes down, you can smoothly switch to another format in the cloud.

With cloud-based communication through UCaaS, manual updates are not needed. This means your IT team no longer has to spend precious time tending to your communication system when they could be improving functionality elsewhere.

With UCaaS, all updates are automatic, and they’re delivered in small batches to avoid disruptions. Any time spent tinkering with internal communication issues can be better spent moving your business operations forward.

When you have a UCaaS platform, you have the flexibility to choose between multiple communication methods depending on what would be most efficient for your company. Additionally, UCaaS can work with your employee’s own devices such as computers, smartphones, and tablets. This allows employees to use whatever devices they’re most comfortable with, which can help their productivity levels.

3. Lower Costs

The only thing better than an efficient and flexible internal communication system is an affordable one. Switching to UCaaS from older communication systems can prove to be incredibly cost-effective because it saves you money on:

  • IT labor
  • Hardware
  • Updates and maintenance
  • Network-carrier service fees

When you purchase UCaaS, you don’t have to buy and set up large amounts of hardware. Instead, the provider hosts the equipment at their facility, and all access is secured through the cloud.

Since your IT team doesn’t have to set up a bulky system or find storage space, your business saves a considerable amount of money on IT labor costs. Not to mention, there are hardly any upfront costs associated with cloud-based services. Rather, the service provider covers the equipment costs, and you pay as you use the service. With UCaaS, you only pay for what you need, which saves you a significant amount of money.

We’re not done yet. With UCaaS, you don’t even have to worry about updates or maintenance. These details are covered by the service provider, so you never have to pay for time consuming system updates or frustrating repairs.

Say goodbye to costly network-carrier service fees because all you need to access UCaaS is an internet connection. With all the money you save from switching to UCaaS, your IT staff can focus on other important projects that directly impact your company’s growth and expansion.

 

Make the Switch to UCaaS Today

As you can tell, UCaaS offers many pivotal benefits for your business such as remote work support, efficiency, and affordability. Beyond these top 3 benefits, UCaaS is also flexible, easy to operate, and provides stringent security. So what are you waiting for? Say goodbye to your clunky, slow, and expensive communications systems and step into the future with UCaaS.

If you’re ready to take your business’s internal communications to the next level, reach out to Integrated Communications today. You can schedule a free network audit to discover the best telecommunications solutions for your company. For more tips and tricks on how to improve your business communications, check out the other articles on our blog.

Why SMBs are Turning to UCaaS

shutterstock_183268340smThe hosted unified communications (UC), or Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), market continues to expand as the technology develops. Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are those most likely adopt this service. The desire to use UCaaS is logical for SMBs because of their need for mobility, as they often employ sales teams and other employees who spend a lot of time in the field.

 

At the same time, SMBs typically have smaller IT teams that may struggle to meet the technological needs of the company. In order to meet these demands, hosted cloud services are ideal. There are several benefits smaller enterprises experience when switching to UCaaS.

Increased Productivity and Technological Capabilities

One of the main advantages of UCaaS is the ability for SMBs to operate much like their larger, corporate competitors by using state-of-the-art technology that allows employees to easily connect with coworkers, customers, and business partners. UCaaS allows remote employees to conduct business as if they were operating out of a local office. Rather than waiting for email responses, instant messaging capabilities allow for real-time questions and updates. Many companies don’t even make phone calls anymore unless they absolutely have to, since UCaaS provides efficient communication methods that replace voice communications.

For businesses that do rely on voice communications, UC can include features such as “Find Me/Follow Me” that put calls through to multiple people until someone available can answer. A hosted UC solution can also transcribe voicemail messages and provide links to audio for employees’ convenience.

Streamlined Administration and Deployment

Another benefit of a hosted UC solution is increased efficiency of administration and deployment. If a company’s internal network is capable, businesses can make a full transition to hosted UC within weeks of implementation. Employees can download necessary apps on pre-programmed mobile devices, giving workforces all of the tools they need to run operations smoothly. Employees and employers can use a web portal to centralize administration operations, with custom profiles that make it easy for each person to use.

Improved Finances

Hosted UC offers customers a simple, reasonable monthly OpEx charge and eliminates the costs of integrating the new Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) trunks, private branch exchange (PBX), and Session Border Controllers (SBCs) that are normally required. There’s no need for third party video conferencing or other solutions, because they’re included with UCaaS. A/V collaboration is also included in the final price, along with regular and long distance calling.

Improved Coworker and Customer Collaboration

Online collaboration is another element that’s simplified with UCaaS. People can communicate with each other from any location. If someone is traveling for a business meeting miles away from the office and needs more information from a certain department, he or she can simply use a private audio or video conferencing solution to bring the other, more knowledgeable colleague into the meeting instantly.

These are just several of the many benefits that make switching to UCaaS an invaluable decision for any business.