Guest Post by Steven Kelley, Channel Marketing Manager for Nextiva

Today, product and service reliability and quality are table stakes. They are the consumer’s minimum expectation of product/service capability and performance. Now add in speed, and the minimum expectation is a product/service that works, works well, and works fast.

These days the expectation is that consumption is more than functional, it is experiential. The product (or service) does its job so well, it triggers emotion - an ‘event’ - in the mind of the user. Done right, this is the first step in establishing brand loyalty.

Businesses today will excel or wither based on how effectively they ensure a highly favorable customer experience (CX).

The explosion in ‘as-a-Service’ applications has enabled companies - and industries - to deploy ‘as-a-Service’ throughout a range of functions that make them more efficient, more effective, and more oriented towards ensuring CX. I’ll be discussing two of those here – UCaaS and CCaaS – and why their combination ensures a winning business strategy.

The Building Blocks for Excellent Cx

I opened this discussion with the claim that creating a positive CX entails more than a product or service just ‘doing its job.’ The core elements that dictate the experience must operate in concert - as a system - to ensure CX.

To illustrate our point, let’s consider a customer support center. Core elements include products (hardware, etc.), processes (information routing) and people (customer services reps). Their interdependencies dictate the outcome of the customer’s experience.

However, not all are weighted equally. The best people and processes cannot be successful if the products they use fail to perform. Conversely, quality products and the best personnel cannot succeed without sound processes. But it is process integrity that serves as the Achilles heel, as proper interactions are mandatory to ensure proper outcomes. Quality expert W. Edwards Deming summed it up best when he said a bad system will beat a good person every time.

So let’s talk about the systems/processes that drive not only CX, but also operational efficiencies like costs and services. Lets jump into UCaaS and CCaaS.

Benefits of Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS)

With UCaaS, all communication functions, like voice and telephony, meeting solutions, messaging presence, and instant messaging, are combined as a roll-up communications service architecture and delivered over the cloud on a pay-as-you-go basis.

UCaaS provides a perfect fit for organizations of all sizes as it:  

• Removes the expense of owning and maintaining a bulky IT infrastructure
• Enables businesses to scale quickly and remain agile with a low cost of ownership
• Promotes collaboration by providing a platform that gives workers the software and tools they need to engage in real time, regardless of where they are
• Drives major cost reductions and increases productivity by eliminating the requirement for multiple communication platforms or software
• Improves productivity by assisting with automation, data storage, and communication prioritization
• Boasts being virtually limitless in scalability by using the internet as its operating platform (and thanks to the explosion of 5G, the IoT and edge computing)

With UCaaS, the benefits indirectly improve CX by enhancing the organization to be better run and more effective – and therefor more pleasant to engage with from the customer side. However, there’s another element that directly impacts CX – CCaaS. When combined with UCaaS, we see tremendous synergy.

Benefits of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)

Like UCaaS, CCaaS is also subscription based, but has a different role. Its mission is to streamline and enhance a company’s customer support function by refining CX and boosting customer satisfaction.

Operationally, CCaaS solutions go beyond just handling inbound and outbound communications. CCaaS enables omnichannel customer support, allowing companies to use other digital channels like live chats, social media messages, and emails. Contact center agents can respond similarly to a customer question or issue, regardless of the support channel the customer uses. The customer gets a good experience, being met where they are.

Among the biggest advantages of CCaaS is that it saves support teams time and energy that were previously dedicated to daily tasks and a jumble of applications (like spreadsheets, schedulers, analytics, etc.). CCaaS quickly automates routine tasks, enabling support teams to focus on helping customers, boosting productivity and analyzing customer responsiveness. Agents solve problems more quickly, having all the data they need immediately in front of them.

Other benefits available with CCaaS solutions include:

• Advanced reporting and analytics
• Call queuing and routing
• Artificial Intelligence (AI)
• International and local numbers
• Various personalization options (such as creating different caller greetings depending on the situation)
• IVR menu
• Easy integration with business systems such as CRMs and help desks

Leveraging the Advantages of Ucaas and CCaaS Together

On average, companies today use 15-25 applications to communicate, manage, and collaborate with customers and teams. This fragmentation not only lends itself to incongruences in customer engagement, but its patchwork of independent silos costs companies time and money.

Conversely, the utilization of UCaaS and CCaaS in tandem creates a seamless efficiency of operations. It also provides deeper, more meaningful customer engagements. Lastly, it increases revenue by lowering operating expenses (thanks to a reduced number of systems) and reducing customer churn.

Compared to firms with on-premise solutions, the case for integrating UCaaS and CCaaS is striking.

Firms that integrate UCaaS and CCaaS together outperform ones with on-premises infrastructure alone. They attained higher customer satisfaction, revenue, and efficiency:

• 99% increased revenue
• 56% improvement in customer service ratings
• 37% lift in agent productivity

Source: Nextiva Never Compromise the Customer Experience eBook

With integrated UCaaS and CCaaS, organizations can leverage:

• CRM Integration: Acting upon all customer interactions with one source of truth
• Secure Customer Meetings: Meeting with customers securely over video and screen sharing
• Engaging With Experts: Reaching subject matter experts across the entire organization
• Team Collaboration: Coaching teams to perform their best using virtual workspaces
• Customer Sentiment Gauging: Surfacing real-time customer sentiment data to agents and supervisors
• Virtual Agents: Resolving basic requests without any live agent interaction
• Omni-Channel Opportunities: Delivering a seamless experience across all touch-points
• Predictive Analytics: Receiving suggested next steps based on customer trends

The benefits speak for themselves. UCaaS and CCaaS are strong on their own, and unstoppable as joined forces. They offer a winning business strategy, indeed.

[Related: For more of an explanation on why integrating UCaaS and CCaaS is key, read Nextiva’s eBook.]

Integration in Action: Nextiva-FIVE9 Partnership

Earlier this year, Nextiva and Five9 joined up to demonstrate the combined value of UCaaS and CCaaS, leveraging their respective strengths as providers. The joint solution facilitates a simpler engagement process for customers, allowing them to further streamline operations by optimizing their overall cloud investments using a single vendor.

The result is a robust, efficient, and streamlined solution, supported by Nextiva’s service, under a single contract.

Learn more about the partnership.

About Nextiva

Businesses can no longer look at communications as simply connecting two or more parties via voice, video, or messaging. It is not enough in today’s environment. Nextiva is bringing together communications, customer management, intelligence, and automation into a single purpose-built platform to create a better customer experience. Learn more about the value of Connected Communications at www.nextiva.com.

About the Author

Steven Kelley is the Channel Marketing Manager for Nextiva, where he develops marketing strategies and integrated marketing programs for partners.