Communication plays an important role in any business. It connects with the customers and improves sales. Now, it is becoming digital. Teams use various channels to collect customers’ information and contact them. CCaaS and UCaaS solutions boost employee productivity, improve customer service, extend customer satisfaction, and expand your business. Here are more tips on how to buy CCaaS and UCaaS solutions, and what are their features & benefits to your business.
Contact centers are all about using communication channels to speed up business growth. But, nowadays, customers want personalized offers and conversations with any company. So, a business can offer solutions to their customer’s needs through video, social media channels, SMS, etc. But, contact centers need a technological revamp to keep pace with the changing times and customers’ needs. Here, UCaaS and CCaaS can help businesses to sort out the problems of customer care.
Before we begin our discussion on how to buy CCaaS and UCaaS, it is important to first understand what is CCaaS and UCaaS. Also, let’s have a look at various aspects of these two solutions.
What is CCaaS & Why You Need it?
CCaaS or Contact Center as a Service can be defined as the software deployment framework. It combines cloud-based infrastructure and the hosting principles of contact centers. It is similar to the SaaS model where the software and applications reside in the cloud. It reduces the cost of ownership in a monthly subscription fee and provides the convenience of ramping up or down the licenses. Also, it supports new features as the provider pushes the updates, automatically.
During the pandemic, companies realized that cloud-based solution is a must for their business continuity planning. For the contact center, it is CCaaS that provides the best business continuity with work from anywhere agents.
The Features of CCaaS:
Using the accurate CCaaS provider, you can increase the reach of your products and services, get more and more customers and implement new communication channels. Moreover, you can even unlock the massive benefits of AI. So, here are the features that you can use to get the most out of CCaaS:
- Call Recording: CCaaS provides call recordings that you can use to improve the call quality and customer experience. The call recordings can also be pushed to the client’s cloud account like GCP, Azure, or Amazon.
- IVR: IVR feature integrated with CCaaS directs the call to the right department that the caller exactly needs. CCaaS offers an automated call distributor (ACD) feature that helps to route the customers’ calls to the right agent and right department automatically.
- ACD when integrated with interactive voice response (IVR) helps in inbound call routing based on the routing algorithm like skill-based routing, round-robin, or least active agent.
- Besides, you can get valuable insight into call volume, waiting time, agent-handling time, day-wise call breaks up details, call durations based on the intent of the caller, and TAT summary i.e. agent wise Turn Around Time.
- CRM Integration: Apart from these, ACD streamlines customer relationship management (CRM), provides crucial coverage to handle customers’ inquiries, and address their concerns.
- Omnichannel Competencies: Also, ACD supports omnichannel communications (voice, SMS, email, chat, social media).
- Predictive Dialer: Predictive Dialer is key to maximizing outbound dialing. With its pacing algorithm, it can make calls to multiple numbers is able to detect busy tones and answering machines, and transfers the call to the call agent once the live person is connected.
- Call agents across the globe can connect and work together using its cloud-based interface.
- Supervisors can monitor real-time activity. The dashboards and analytics provide a cockpit view of the entire operation irrespective of geography.
- Besides, it also offers different monitoring options like whisper coaching, live call barge, call conferencing, etc. These features allow supervisors to listen to the calls of agents. Further, it helps them to introduce the necessary improvements to the calls to meet customers’ needs.
What is UCaaS & its Benefits?
UCaaS is a cloud-based deployment method. It integrates various communication functions such as meetings, chats, calls, SMS, video, and many more. You can integrate UCaaS with many other business applications such as Zendesk, G-Suite, Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Oracle Netsuite. Users can use customizable application programming interfaces to leverage them by deploying video-on-demand, chatbots, and other customer-oriented communications improvements.
So it is obvious that CCaaS is the preferred solution for contact centers where they are managing high volume calls and interactions. UCaaS is the erstwhile hosted PBX and is now available in the cloud with all the office management tools, video conference, calendar, team collaboration, document sharing, etc. So, UCaaS is useful for all office-related communication and not for contact centers.
UCaaS is Immensely useful for various organizations in many ways such as:-
1. Consolidates Communication Data:
UCaaS consolidates various communications data. Further, it connects the consolidated data to other crucial business data through application integrations. Employees use such features to move from one communication channel to other instantly. They do it without any interruption. Here, it does not matter whether they are working from their mobile devices or using office desktops. Employees get the latest and most relevant information about their customers. As a result, the customer data helps them to focus on the strategies and improve sales.
2. Offer Real-time Analytics:
UCaaS offers real-time analytics that allows contact center managers to look into communication data trends. For example, they can find out valuable information about customer satisfaction (CSAT), call volume, customer retention, customer effort score, etc. Besides, it informs about the bottlenecks allowing you to alleviate these. In turn, you can improve the efficiency of your business.
3. Mobilize Workforce:
The pandemic has changed the current scenario in business. Nowadays, mobility is the need of every business. Lockdown conditions and social distancing measures implemented by the governments forced employers to adopt work from home policy. The work-from-home scenario is going to stay in the scene even after Corona vanishes. In such scenarios, UCaaS has emerged as a great solution. It allows your employees to log in and access all the communication tools they use in their office regardless of them working from home, on the go, or some other distant place. They can even access video conferencing from anywhere.
UCaaS solution makes the work of remote workers easy in every way. They can send and receive messages and transfer calls from their mobile devices to anywhere. For example, they can transfer it to their colleagues, desk phones, and also to contact centers. Plus, teams can also collaborate through video conferencing from anywhere and at any time. All these features help workers to stay productive, connected, and accountable.
4. Lead to Revenue Growth:
As expected, UCaaS makes the employees of any company productive. It helps them to deliver a positive customer experience. In turn, your company earns a good reputation in the market and improves sales. As a result, the company leads to good revenue growth.
Until now, we know about UCaaS and CCaaS solutions in detail. Plus, we understand how these are helpful for customer-centric businesses, companies, and contact centers. Seeing its huge potential and usability, many businesses must be thinking to buy it. So, to help such businesses, I have mentioned six useful tips to buy CCaaS and UCaaS solutions.
Six Tips to Buy CCaaS and UCaaS Solutions:
The pandemic has impacted contact centers badly. They have become overburdened. Covid has led to an exponential rise in call volumes across the globe. Plus, companies had to rely on remote working. In short, the recent pandemic has accelerated hybrid work culture for call agents and employees. According to Gartner, 90 percent of businesses are planning to allow their employees to work from home even after the pandemic subsided. In such scenarios, companies are looking to invest in new technologies to remain productive, efficient, and maintenance costs.
So, if you are thinking to invest in UCaaS and CCaaS in near future, then first assess your needs. Here are some tips that can help you to do so:-
1. Define the Objective of the Project:
Before you invest in CCaaS and UCaaS, find out the objective of your project. Most preferably, write down why you want these new solutions. For example, you can use CCaaS and UCaaS to improve customer service capabilities. So, be clear about your short-term and long-term IT and business objectives to be accomplished using CCaaS and UCaaS. Take concrete decisions about the resources you wish to integrate into a CCaaS or UCaaS platform.
2. Be Specific about Functionalities & Features:
Think about the important feature and functionalities that you want with CCaaS and UCaaS. Also, make a list of operational requirements such as how it should work or what you need. Plus, make a list of features you want now as well as in the future. For example, you can include features like reporting, real-time management, screen recording, call recording, omnichannel, speech analytics, etc. It is important that you select the features that you require because the CcaaS vendors may have different tiers/plans. Also, some of the vendors would try to lock you for an annual or multi-year contract. It is important to do the cost/benefit analysis before signing up for a multi-year contract.
3. Determine the Timeline and Scope:
When you look into your business objectives, assess the scope for purchasing frameworks like CCaaS and UCaaS, webchat, AI/chatbots, texting solutions, interactive voice response(IVR), etc. Besides, if you need a deadline or timeline to implement the framework, then think about it carefully. For example, you may need time to choose a vendor. Also, you may wish to implement the CCaaS and UCaaS solutions in phases.
4. Look for Integration and Flexibility:
Before you buy CCaaS and UCaaS, figure out if your provider can customize the solutions according to your business needs. Ask your CCaaS and UCaaS provider whether they offer to choose from public, hybrid, or private cloud models. What are third-party integrations they provide and APIs that are exposed by the vendors? It can be as simple as click2call so that call can be initiated from the CRM or lead push API, so that leads generated by GoogleAds or SocialMedia Ads are automatically pushed to dialer. Also, ask if their tools are scalable to accommodate unexpected events or rapid growth. In short, flexibility and innovation should be an integral part of the CCaaS and UCaaS providers.
5. Security, Compliance, and Expertise:
Nowadays, losing sensitive customer data to cybercriminals is the biggest threat to businesses. So, in this age of cybercrimes and data breaches, find out whether your CCaaS and UCaaS provider have the proper certifications proving what protocols they meet or have in place to safeguard your data. Apart from this, your CCaaS and UCaaS service providers must have a deep understanding of this technology. They should have solid expertise and must know about the latest and upcoming trends. Plus, they should be willing to provide training to your teams walking them through the ins and outs of the technology.
6. Record of Success and Reliability:
Reliability of the technology and network comes first when you choose a CCaaS or UCaaS vendor. Ask your vendor to present the documentation of the uptime record. The uptime record should be 99 percent or higher than this. Besides, find out how many clients your CCaaS and UCaaS providers have worked with in the past. Searching into their past experiences will help you to know about their success record. For example, find out whether your CCaaS and UCaaS providers have worked across a wide range of industries or not. And the most important is the quality of support and support level SLA that the vendor is ready to provide. What-if the SLAs are not maintained and ensure that the downside is covered up.
Conclusion:
Today, almost all companies want to embrace a hybrid working model. They want to include it in their long-term strategies. Plus, businesses are continually working hard to improve communication both internally and externally. CCaaS and UCaaS frameworks deliver a comprehensive suite of tools that makes communication seamless and assist in achieving an incredible customer engagement rate.
