The contact center lies at the heart of your customer experience. By integrating your contact center with a unified communications platform, you can enable effective collaboration between the contact center and the rest of the organization and, ultimately, deliver a better customer experience.
Here's how you can leverage the combined benefits of your unified communications and contact center solutions to better meet your customers' needs.
What are UCaaS and CCaaS?
When exploring how unified communications as a service (UCaaS) pairs with contact center as a service (CCaaS) to enhance the customer experience, it's helpful to understand how companies use these communications technologies today. So, you might ask, what is UCaaS? UCaaS is a cloud-based business collaboration solution that unifies multiple communications channels including voice, video, messaging and presence in a single platform. Businesses use UCaaS to improve productivity and boost internal collaboration, especially across a remote workforce.
CCaaS powers a company's external communications—that is, customer communications. CCaaS serves up advanced call center operations in the cloud, empowering businesses to innovate and deliver a differentiated customer experience. Omnichannel communications let businesses engage with customers via their channels of choice—such as phone, SMS, online chat, or email—while analytics insights help companies continually improve the customer experience.
Companies can unlock the combined value of UCaaS and CCaaS at a lower price point, enjoying a speedy deployment while also taking advantage of the cloud's flexibility and scalability. With a reduced administrative burden, IT staff is free to focus on strategic initiatives. Since CCaaS offers a predictable cost structure based on regular recurring operating expenditures rather than hefty up front capital outlays, businesses can more effectively manage their communications investment.
Benefits of combining UCaaS and CCaaS
Businesses benefit from combining UCaaS and CCaaS in several ways. With optimized customer relationship management (CRM) integration, employees have access to contextual information when engaging with customers. This means they don't have to spend as much time familiarizing themselves with the customer's situation or their past interactions with the company. When businesses integrate customer engagement data with the CCaaS and UCaaS platforms, agents can readily see how, when and where a specific customer prefers to be engaged. All of these insights allow contact center agents to deliver satisfying service in less time.
Contact center agents can quickly coordinate with teams using UCaaS collaboration tools, obtaining rapid answers to questions that aid in a speedy resolution. Having a single application to manage all customer engagement and communications also makes it easier for employees, who no longer have to keep mental tabs on the differences between the two applications. With unified analytics providing comprehensive visibility into the business communications and customer engagement systems, business leaders can spot opportunities for fine-tuning the customer experience.
Businesses that combine UCaaS with CCaaS can access all of these benefits at a reduced cost, using the savings to pursue other customer experience priorities. Streamlined operations and increased employee productivity also positively impact the bottom line.
Business considerations for combining UCaaS and CCaaS
There are a few factors to consider when combining UCaaS with CCaaS, beginning with the cost. What are you currently spending on unified communications and the contact center, and are you realizing a meaningful return on that investment? Particularly if one or both of your existing solutions is premises-based, you will likely spot some compelling cost savings.
Secondly, how well do your existing communications and customer engagement solutions integrate with one another? Do you encounter challenges in exchanging information that you could overcome by combining your UCaaS solution with your CCaaS application?
Lastly, would a complete view of analytics across the unified communications and contact center platforms better help you determine how to improve contact center performance? Then you might want to compare the insights you are able to access today with what you could gain from a joint UCaaS-CCaaS solution.
If you haven't yet considered combining UCaaS and CCaaS to deliver a better customer experience, now is an excellent time. Taking advantage of the best benefits both solutions offer will help you be more responsive to your customers, inspiring the kind of customer loyalty that drives impressive business growth.
Learn how Verizon's Unified Communications and Collaboration as a Service unifies your workforce.