Better Together: Integrate UCaaS & CCaaS to Improve Customer Experience

It’s not supposed to be this way.

Phone systems and call centers are meant to bring your teams together, but for many organizations, they’re siloed. Apps designed to help your business respond to customer needs send them to competitors.

The adoption of unified communications as a service (UCaaS) tools increased dramatically with COVID-19, transforming business communications as companies had to support and connect employees working from home. While such cloud-based technologies are vital, integration remains a challenge. UCaaS and contact center as a service (CCaaS) systems exist as separate tools, blocking customer service from other parts of the business and creating barriers between incoming data sets.

Free Download: Mastering UCaaS and CCaaS

What’s the cost of this separation, and how does it impact customers? “Never compromise the customer experience: Why integrating UCaaS and CCaaS is key,” an e-book from Nextiva and Five9, examines these problems and presents a practical solution.

The cost of disjointed UCaaS and CCaaS technology

The customer experience environment is only getting more complex.

New communication channels and evolving customer needs are just the start. The number of customer-facing teams within the business has grown. Contact centers, customer service, marketing, IT, billing, and other teams have a piece of the customer experience. Without a reliable way to link the insights and context residing in each, no one in the organization can get a clear picture of the customer. The result is siloed teams and lost customers.

Research from Five9 shows that 75% of customers expect businesses to maintain information about their past interactions, and 59% say they’ll end the relationship if getting help requires too much effort. Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer study uncovered some intriguing trends around consumer sentiment: Almost two-thirds of consumers have to repeat themselves to different representatives. Similarly, 54% felt that sales, service, and marketing teams don’t share information, leading to poor internal communication.

Then, there are the financial downsides from lost productivity and inefficiency, which include implementation and cloud hosting costs, unexpected project overruns, and security audits and remediation.

Siloed teams, disparate data streams, unhappy customers, and frustrated employees are not a recipe for successful customer interactions. In a customer-first world, an integrated approach is essential for understanding customers and improving internal collaboration.

Integrate UCaaS and CCaaS for Better Customer Experiences

It’s a customer-first world. Speed, convenience, and personalization are table stakes. Businesses that meet the high bar customers themselves have set for great experiences will come out on top. Integrating UCaaS and CCaaS solutions is an important step toward that goal.

Dom Black, Research Director at cloud communications analyst company Cavell Group, cited the data to back that up: “[Our research] shows that 60% of businesses said that the biggest driver to integrate their voice service with their contact center service was to enable better customer experiences. An integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution enables agents to collaborate with the correct person at any time on the same platform.”

Strategic advisory firm Metrigy found that firms with integrated UCaaS and CCaaS outperform ones with on-premises infrastructure alone. Overall, they have achieved increased revenue and a 56% improvement in customer service ratings.

The good news is that UCaaS and CCaaS can come together. Nextiva works with Five9 to help businesses achieve this.

Using Nextiva Contact Center, an integrated solution with its unified communications platform, agents can field calls, chats, and emails using omnichannel features while staying in sync with colleagues through various communication tools. When contact center agents need help, they can see who’s available for real-time support and call, transfer, or conference them in. This way, they can render the best possible experience and minimize unnecessary callbacks.

Nextiva Contact Center also helps businesses enhance customer engagement by integrating CRM tools for one source of truth:

• Integrate CRM tools for one source of truth
• Reach SMEs from across the organization
• Collaborate better through virtual workspaces and video conferencing
• Surface real-time customer sentiment
• Leverage predictive analytics based on customer trends

Related Article

How to Create a Unified Customer Experience (CX) at Scale in Four Steps

Ken McMahon

The Future of UCaaS and CCaaS

Integrating UCaaS and CCaaS changes the way your business operates — and how it delivers on customer satisfaction. This e-book provides insight into:

• How businesses scale with cloud communication solutions
• Why segmented internal and external communications hurt customer experience
• How to integrate UCaaS platforms and CCaaS platforms
• The future of the contact center and the comparison of UCaaS vs CCaaS

To learn more about the benefits of integration, download your copy today!