Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

UCaaS vs. CCaaS – What is the Difference?

UCaaS and CCaaS do have similar functionality, but they’re typically prioritized by different departments and used for different purposes.

UCaaS – Unified Communication as a Service brings together an enterprise’s communication applications (including voice, messaging, video, telephony, app collaboration and conferencing) into a single cloud-based platform. These solutions are typically utilized by IT to modernize phone systems and streamline workflows. They’re built to support mobility and interoffice collaboration, with new advanced features like call routing and forwarding, conference bridging, virtual receptionist, and voicemail-to-email transcription.

CCaaS – Contact Center as a Service then, also enables multichannel communication via a single cloud-based platform, but where UCaaS is more about internal collaboration, CCaaS is centered around customer communication. Utilization tends to be made (or heavily influenced) by sales and service leaders and contact center solutions are designed to make it easy for agents to connect with customers, whether those agents are outbound salespeople or inbound service reps. CCaaS includes features such as split recording, skills-based routing, customer authentication, and AI-powered voice analytics.

By bundling UCaaS and CCaaS, companies get the functionality of various apps and platforms from one Cloud-hosted vendor by integrating all functionality into one application that can handle both collaboration and communication. They also get the ability to heavily monitor network and employee behavior, with leading reporting and analysis tools for monitoring, recording and performance enhancing tools.  That means no expensive hardware to install or manage, one bill to pay, and one platform for IT to manage by integrating your call center into Teams.

5 Benefits of UCaaS and Contact Center Collaboration

By bundling UCaaS and CCaaS together, businesses immediately receive a much more solid foundation that provides technical equality at a very high level.

Stronger office/contact center collaboration

Contact centers might collaborate directly with internal departments or outbound marketing callers who pass warm leads along to inside sales. Other contact centers are mostly self-sufficient, but they might occasionally need insights and information from office employees.  As an example, if a customer calls a contact center with a question the agent can’t answer, then an agent can view a company directory in UCaaS, check employee statuses to see who’s available in a specific department, start a chat with that internal expert, and get instant answers. If the answers are complicated and require further discussion, the agent can route the customer directly to the expert’s phone.

Better Customer Service

Most people who reach out to a business don’t really know whether they’re talking to someone in an actual company or a contact center. This isn’t really a primary concern, but they absolutely expect fast service and a seamless calling experience. They don’t want to be asked to identify themselves repeatedly, authorize access multiple times or even be told to call a different number. Yet, that’s what happens when office employees and contact center agents don’t communicate in real time or simply route calls to one another.  As an example, imagine a caller who needs tech support and calls the salesperson who sold them the product.  Instead of just giving the customer the tech support hotline number, the salesperson can reach out directly to the contact center team, tee up the conversation, ensure someone is ready to help, and then loop the customer into the call.  UCaaS/CCaaS integration is ideally useful in industries or functions where callers are authenticated, interactions recorded and logged for compliance or large volume of incoming and outgoing calls. When these two systems are integrated, callers only need to be authenticated once, even if they’re routed from one location to another.

Optimized CRM integration

Unified communications platforms are designed to integrate with CRM applications like Hubspot, SharpSpring, Salesforce and many others that enable features like click-to-dial and automatic call logging. While utilizing UCaaS, users can see screen pops identifying incoming callers that come complete with live customer data from CRM. They can also be encouraged and prompted to enter additional information about each call or client interaction, which also gets forever logged in any leading CRM.  By integrating CCaaS and UCaaS, contact center agents get the same functionality which allows CRM systems to stay up to date.  Teams across locations and functions can share data about customer interactions with no awkward toggling or multiple logins required.

Integrated Data

CCaaS is an ideal service solution for many contact centers, offering vast scalability, even as operational needs change.  By providing the flexibility to pay for only the technology needed, investment is low, and costs are significantly reduced while capabilities to better serve customers are expanded.  Multi-channel customer experience analytics and reporting insights go together with these modern interactive data communications like voice response (IVR definition) and customizable capabilities, which result in skills-based call routing for increased first contact resolution strategy. 

The UCaaS/CCaaS combination is a growing trend for many companies struggling to provide for their distributed workforces.  This Cloud delivery model offers an advanced set of communication and collaboration applications and services where integrated communications data means teams across departments and functions are on the same page. Long term, it means being able to leverage sophisticated data analytics tools, IoT automations, and AI algorithms.

Reduced cost of communications

Individually, UCaaS and CCaaS reduce communications costs by providing most everything possible in a unified manner. Rather than piecing together various or legacy phone services, conferencing solutions, and video applications, businesses can now easily get all these services from one platform, in a familiar setting and user interface. By bundling UCaaS and CCaaS, companies get the functionality of both platforms from one vendor, which means no expensive hardware to install or manage, one bill to pay, and one platform for IT to manage.  CCaaS solutions provide incredible benefits for both inbound and outbound and multi-locational call centers.  In the Cloud Tech’s Intelligent Cloud Contact Center Software empowers agents to be more effective, hitting quotas more quickly and providing more informed services. Smart Dialers give agents more time with live prospects by ensuring reps are prepared and callers get agents with specific expertise.  Other multi-channel tools, such as real-time and historical reporting, recording, and workforce management, help companies optimize resources and make life easier on sales and service reps.  Channel hopping and escalation features empower call centers to create truly customer-centric omnichannel experiences.

How CCaaS Benefits Partners and White-Label Subcontractors

Many enterprises are still working through the Cloud migration process but are coordinating this process with the next big step – digital transformation integration.  In this process, technology purchasers still need guidance on how communications tools work together, which solutions work best together, and how to make overall integration as painless as possible.

In the Cloud Tech’s channel partners are well positioned to be integration experts, and as a result, to drive sales, repeat business, and referrals. This allows companies the ability to integrate UCaaS and CCaaS together, as a bundled service. That means a more robust sale for all channel partners, and because UCaaS and CCaaS are typically initiated and utilized by different business management types, so this also means access to new decision-makers and budgets. Channel partners can negotiate bigger deals, and their clients get best-in-class communications solutions that work and provide enormous advances in collaboration and communication on an enterprise level.