How channel resellers can benefit from the blurring lines of UCaaS and CCaaS

Introduction

The paradigm shift towards cloud-hosted business communications and the arrival of the ‘as-a-Service’ era, have enabled businesses to revisit outdated strategies whereby the day to day communication and collaboration tools employed by many organisations, sat on separate tech stacks to their contact centre solutions. 

Initially, as cloud technologies became more prevalent over the last decade, VoIP-based solutions were employed in both areas. However, solutions continued to be used by many businesses in tandem, and while both contact centre and day-to-day communications were migrated to the cloud there was continued inefficiency and cost associated with using disparate platforms, often with no interoperability but with overlapping users and features.

However, over time the feature-sets of leading unified communications solutions have been extended to meet new demands, and in many cases now include tools that enable smaller businesses in particular to behave as ‘informal contact centres’, dealing particularly with inbound traffic in a more sophisticated manner with queues, reporting, wallboards, and sometimes multiple communications channels, without the need for multiple platforms.

What is UCaaS?

UCaaS stands for Unified Communications as a Service. Gartner defines the term as ‘a cloud-based unified communications model that supports enterprise telephony, audio/video/web conferencing, unified messaging, mobility, and other communications-enabled business processes’. 

The underlying technology for UCaaS solutions is VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), with a cloud PBX (Private Branch Exchange) allowing businesses to route their calls to users or groups of users who are no longer tethered to a traditional office environment. 

By carrying voice traffic over the internet, users can be connected via mobile and desktop applications as well as desk-phones, from anywhere with connectivity. To enable efficient collaboration alongside telephony, these applications now usually include team chat functionality, with file sharing and video meetings also often supported.

Like other ‘as a service' solutions, UCaaS is sold via subscription models, giving businesses more flexibility. This is essential when considering how UCaaS vendors, especially those who own their own platform, are so quickly able to roll-out new features. Without physical hardware to upgrade, changes are deployed in the cloud and accessible by customers in real time.

What is CCaaS?

Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) refers to solutions offering SaaS-based applications that enable businesses to manage customer interactions.

They are often built predominantly around VoIP phone systems in a similar way to UCaaS solutions, but they are traditionally focussed solely on managing customer interactions, often handling large volumes of inbound enquiries, sometimes from a multitude of channels. These may include live chat, SMS, email, and other third party channels including social media. 

In their most recent Magic Quadrant for CCaaS, Gartner analysts identified four key pillars for CCaaS platforms:

• Contact routing and interactions - The ability to route customer queries to the best internal resource, usually a live agent.

• Resource management - Tools that allow business managers to optimise their internal resources.

• Process orchestration: incorporating personalisation to customer interactions, with automation where possible.

• Knowledge and insight: Reporting, wallboard, and other operational insights that drive efficiency and performance.

CCaaS solutions offer an adaptive, flexible delivery model with native capabilities across these four functional components but may also offer productised integrations with partner solutions through application marketplaces. These include CRMs, BI tools, ERPs, and order management systems.

Differences

While both UCaaS and CCaaS solutions are cloud-hosted, based around a VoIP PBX, and include many of the same features, there is a marked difference in the use cases for each, the extended capabilities, and perhaps most importantly for many businesses, the pricing associated. 

Where UCaaS is focused on day to day operations and internal collaboration, CCaaS platforms are geared for business to customer interactions particularly for support, customer service, and sometimes sales.

The areas that set CCaaS platforms apart are how they manage large volumes of inbound traffic, routing that traffic effectively based on the internal resource available, the data they provide management to optimise these flows either over long periods of time, or in real time, and some of the advanced AI and automation tools they deliver.

What this means for many businesses is that CCaaS represents a far more substantial financial cost per user. For SMEs in particular it is cost-prohibitive, with minimum user requirements another concern.

Additionally, this can become an issue if, for instance a business has 100 total users, but only 10 who require contact centre features. In a world where UCaaS and CCaaS solutions are built upon disparate platforms that don’t interoperate, a business may be forced to choose more expensive licences for their entire user base or choose a cheaper communications solution that lacks the functionality that may deliver the customer experience they require.

Blurring the lines 

Fortunately for many businesses, we’re seeing a blurring of the lines between UCaaS and CCaaS solutions in terms of functionality. This is making those contact centre features more accessible for a broad range of organisations. There are two key drivers for this:

Centralised communications

As above, businesses expect to be able to communicate on a single platform regardless of whether they are in predominantly customer facing roles or not. This prevents information from being kept in silo and enables customer facing employees to receive support from other areas of the business more easily without requiring multiple platforms.

This also saves time, money, and the expertise required internally for maintaining multiple solutions. CRM and other integrations only need to be set up with one solution, and all of this enables role flexibility within a business.

More and more employees may have an important role to play in customer service. For example, perhaps members of a sales team may cover a company’s customer service calls for three hours on a Thursday - when in the past these employees would need a separate tools for this role, now they can access most of these features from their UCaaS platform - simply logging in and out of the queues or groups they need during those hours.

Informal contact centres

Ultimately, if your business speaks to its customers on the phone, it has a contact centre. Even sole traders may want to include features like on-hold music or callback functionality. Customers are more demanding than ever before in terms of the quality of interactions they expect - so even small businesses must adapt.

This has led to the rise of what Cavell has termed ‘the informal contact centre’. But what do we mean by this? The physical makeup of contact centres is changing for many organisations. Traditionally we may picture large, inflexible sites, with banks of identical desks and agents responding to primarily voice and email queries, routed through an expensive onsite PBX, with little to no interoperability between other online systems.

These large centres, of course, still exist for national or global businesses, but for the 6 million SMEs (less than 50 employees) that exist in the UK this is not how customer service is done. The 13 million people employed in such businesses are distributed around the UK in smaller sites, on-the-road, or even working from home, but their need to remain close to customers is just as great as any large organisation – perhaps even more so.

Advancements in UCaaS

What the above means predominantly is a range of feature improvements for UCaaS solutions to meet the needs of modern businesses. Here are some of the key features, once seen mostly in premium contact centre solutions, but now beginning to be more common within leading UC solutions.

Comprehensive queue functionality: Although call queues have been included within top UC solutions for some time, we see an increase in the functionality of these features. Detailed in-call messaging to let callers know their place in the queue, callback functionality, and flexible ring strategies are now standard tools.

Reporting & analytics: Even small businesses now expect to be able to report on the traffic their users are handling. This means ad-hoc and scheduled reports, tracking key metrics like calls answered, talk and wait times, unanswered or abandoned calls, and more. 

Wallboards: Many of the key metrics that business leaders value in their reporting can also now be represented graphically in real time on live wallboards that give a view on the current status of call traffic and how customer service teams are performing against their KPIs. For instance, maximum wait times being met? How many people are on hold? 

Call recording: It is common for unified communications solutions to include call recording for managing QA and dispute resolution. But some platforms now include or integrate with advanced AI call recording tools that include features like transcription, language and sentiment analysis, and performance measurement dashboards. 

Omnichannel capabilities: This is less common, but increasing among UC providers. This is the ability to manage interactions across channels including social media, WhatsApp Business, Email, and live chat tools built into many websites. These are features that are particularly useful to small businesses, who may use social media regularly.

How can UCaaS resellers benefit

Only 2.5% of channel resellers define CCaaS as their main business (Comms Dealer), while only 17% of channel resellers who sell UCaaS also sell CCaaS (Cavell). What this tells us is that the level of specialism required for resellers focused on larger, more focused CCaaS deployments is high. 

Meanwhile, with the increased capability to deliver contact centre features via UCaaS deployments for a range of market verticals and company sizes, there is the opportunity to deliver solutions that not only enhance customer experience but streamline internal business communication and collaboration.

Some of the key steps resellers can take to serve this growing opportunity:

• Find the right vendor partners with cost-effective, feature-rich solutions

• Serve SMEs or other businesses who have ‘informal contact centre’ needs that aren’t being readily met

• Build value propositions that focus not just on basic telecoms, but incorporate more advanced features that help deliver ARPU and customer stickiness

• Ensure teams are educated and trained for these deployments

At a recent partner roundtable session, Andy Jamieson of Holler Technology told us “The market looks buoyant, but we've got to spread our portfolio around. We have no choice but to diversify”, explaining how the focus on cost has driven down the profitability of core solutions. 

Meeting a sweet spot where cost-effectiveness meets CCaaS capability will enable resellers to reclaim ARPU and make their UC solutions more profitable while delivering products which empower employee collaboration and customer experience. This in turn positions them as a strategic partner for businesses looking to optimise their communications in a landscape where digital interactions are more important than ever before.

Contact us to learn more about the contact centre features available as part of the CallSwitch One unified communications platform.