UCaaS vs. CCaaS

UCaaS versus CCaaS

Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) have long lived a parallel lifestyle as the next generation of their premise based counterparts. As companies evolved and tired of buying/maintaining expensive on-prem hardware these Cloud based solutions grew in popularity alongside each other serving very different customer bases.

This parallel existence is slowly starting to converge. In the beginning, different business units within the same company would have different needs that dictated a different solution. As you would expect, the contact center within a company would need CCaaS while other departments were perfectly content with the features available with the lower costing UCaaS solution.

Once both solutions started to appear within the same company IT leaders started to see value in having a single vendor that provided both solutions. Very quickly UCaaS and CCaaS vendors started putting together their own version of others’ solutions to offer or went out and acquired a company with a solution they could quickly incorporate into their portfolio. Why engage two different companies to support all of your users voice/communication needs when you can use one that has a solution for each?

Where the worlds started to converge even more was when users outside of the contact center saw value in all of the information available via the CCaaS solution. So today we will look at a comparison of the two models.

UCaaS

Modern UCaaS solutions have a large host of features that will meet the needs of many users throughout a business. Call forwarding, hold, voicemail, call forwarding to cell phones and some even have low-level integrations with CRM’s. These solutions fulfill all of the basic telephony needs that a business has had to solve for. It also allows for a mobile workforce by allowing users to forward to and call from their cell phones.
UCaaS solutions give companies the flexibility to leverage traditional desk phones or soft-phones and headsets without the need to purchase or maintain expensive on-premise equipment. Traditionally most departments outside of support and contact center would find everything they need and more in the feature set from UCaaS at a price point that makes it a no-brainer!

Learn more about UCaasS

CCaaS

For the users who really need the world at their fingertips CCaaS is the solution of their dreams. Combine everything that UCaaS brings to the table with a deep bench of integrations including ticketing tools, CRM’s, ERP’s, project management and marketing applications. A user leveraging CCaaS technology will have all of the information the company has on any given user at their fingertips while they are on the phone with the ability to log notes, easily escalate the call, start recording at any point with the flexibility of working from anywhere with an internet connection. Add to all of these tools omni-channel communication giving agents the ability to communicate and follow-up across a multitude of common communication platforms (text, phone, chat, email, social media, etc.) and you have a truly empowered user.

From a management standpoint CCaaS gives supervisors the ability to track the metrics that truly dictate what their customer experience is like when talking to a call center agent. Whether it is hold-time, time to resolution, number of transfers or any number of other common KPI’s; management will have all of the information at their fingertips to quickly identity poor processes and improve them to make sure they are providing an exceptional customer experience.


Learn more about CCaasS

As these two technologies slowly continue to converge we will see more and more users outside of the call centers leveraging CCaaS for their communications in order to have access to the added integrations and visibility that they provide. Forward thinking IT professionals will start looking at the toolset that CCaaS provides and asking management outside of the contact center if those features have an ROI within their own department.

Next time you are on the phone with a customer, take a second to think about some of those features and how much easier they could be making your life…

Talk with an expert

Are you ready to experience the Wired Networks difference for yourself?

For more information, we invite you to explore our blog and Knowledge Center. Reach out anytime to send us a message, ask a question, request a quote or get in touch with us directly.