Unified communications as a service (UCaaS) helps you integrate communication channels and data into a cloud platform, breaking down information silos. It enables contextual, timely, and personalized customer engagements.
Quick links:
Differences between CX and UCaaS
What are the benefits of using UCaaS?
Seamless omnichannel engagement
Improved customer relationships
The outcomes of UCaaS in customer experience (CX) are higher customer satisfaction, faster issue resolution, and stronger brand loyalty.
Want to learn how to implement UCaaS into your business and enhance your CX? Schedule your free consultation today!
What is UCaaS?
Unified communications as a service refers to the delivery of a unified solution that is centrally hosted in the cloud, rather than located on-premises. UCaaS platforms integrate multiple communication channels—including voice calling, video conferencing, messaging, chat, and file sharing—into a single platform.
Businesses can tap into these cloud-based capabilities to enable employees, customers, partners, and other stakeholders to seamlessly connect and collaborate across the modes of communication that work best for them. With the infrastructure hosted off-site, UCaaS allows organizations to scale capabilities up or down flexibly.
UCaaS consolidates business communications infrastructure into a single interface. This eliminates information silos and reduces costs compared to managing separate on-premises systems.
What Are the Main Differences Between UCaaS and CX?
UCaaS is a suite of technological solutions. CX is a domain of concern. You want happy customers (CX), so you implement technology solutions such as UCaaS to remove points of friction.
- UCaaS are cloud-based solutions that consolidate multiple communications functionalities, like telephony, messaging, video meetings, and contact center operations into an integrated platform architecture. UCaaS represents the technology backbone enabling streamlined business communications.
- CX represents all interactions and perceptions customers have with a brand. It encapsulates the end-to-end journey a client has across marketing, sales, and service engagements. CX represents the business outcome enabled by solutions like UCaaS.
UCaaS delivers technology infrastructure while CX focuses on the human experiences. Done properly, UCaaS and other solutions elevate CX.
Benefits of Using UCaaS
UCaaS technology enables businesses to interact in more modern and effective ways. With the integration of multiple channels into cloud-based platforms, your business can:
- Enhance flexibility. Unified communications platforms promote mobility and flexible access across devices from desktops to mobile phones.
- Improve productivity. Streamlined systems eliminate toggling between apps and windows.
- Reduce costs. No large capital investments are needed for on-site equipment.
- Advance capabilities. Artificial intelligence (AI) integration, analytics dashboards, enterprise integrations. UCaaS solutions showcase innovation difficult with premise-based models.
- Increase responsiveness. Respond faster and more effectively to issues and customer feedback.
UCaaS is an Integrated Platform
UCaaS breaks down technology and data silos by converging previously disconnected systems into a unified cloud architecture.
UCaaS solutions strategically integrate the following data streams.
Communication Channels
- Voice. Cloud telephony features like auto-attendants, IVRs, calling
- Video. Seamless video conferencing and screen sharing
- Instant messaging. SMS and text capabilities directly within the platform
- Web Chat. Live messaging on websites
- Social media. Platform connectivity to social data streams
The interweaving of these real-time engagement channels, coupled with enabling capabilities such as skills-based routing and automatic hand-offs, empowers smooth transitions for customers across their preferred mediums.
Customer Data Sources
- Customer relationship management (CRM). Integrations with popular CRM tools
- Contact center. Interaction histories, case management data
- Backend enterprise software.Connecting large legacy software like SAP
UCaaS links these data sources and provides agents and automation with a more holistic context to drive personalized, contextual engagements that feel natural.
With foundational elements unified in the cloud, UCaaS solutions transform fragmented systems into coherent customer engagement engines able to meet rising expectations.
UCaaS Provides Omnichannel Engagement
A key advantage of UCaaS is enabling true omnichannel customer engagement across both digital and voice channels. This unified approach delivers these benefits for improving customer satisfaction through ongoing interactions:
- Consistent experience
- Contextual interactions
- Quick responses
Consistent Experience
With UCaaS, businesses can meet customer expectations for seamless transitions between engagement channels.
Whether they call your support line, message on Facebook, or start a web chat, they’ll have a unified experience as conversations occur in context across channels, on their preferred method.
Contextual Interactions
A unified omnichannel platform also enables deeper, more meaningful customer conversations through contextual interactions. By maintaining context across channels, UCaaS solutions facilitate:
- Complete customer history. UCaaS platforms consolidate all interactions with a customer into a single record, providing agents with their complete history across channels.
- Natural conversations. Since customer details are presented to agents handling the next channel interaction, discussions progress naturally without repetition of information.
Quick, Accurate Responses
UCaaS solutions enable quick, accurate responses to customer inquiries through advanced capabilities such as:
- Real-time analytics that use speech recognition and AI to analyze interactions and prompt agents with relevant information.
- Skills-based routing that sends inquiries to the best available agent equipped to handle the issue.
- Self-service options that let customers tap chatbots, knowledge bases, and FAQs to find resolutions without waiting on an agent.
UCaaS Enhances the Customer Journey
UCaaS solutions create a better customer service experience by enhancing digital-first customer journeys. Using built-in collaboration tools, contact center agents, business leaders, and support teams can engage seamlessly to understand the context of customer queries and requests.
Here are some of the functionalities a UCaaS can provide:
- Unifies front and back-office teams onto a single communications platform to drive seamless collaboration across departments focused on customer experience.
- Provides managers with a universal queue and comprehensive visibility into all customer inquiries and agent metrics.
- Offers user-friendly self-service options like chatbots and interactive voice responses to allow customers to conveniently find answers without agent assistance.
- Leverages customer data and machine learning to predict needs and proactively deliver personalized service offers.
- Arms human agents with integrated customer history and case data to facilitate natural, contextual conversations.
- Enables omnichannel consistency with seamless hand-offs as customers transition across integrated communication channels
- Automates repetitive workflows to accelerate response times and case resolution speed for a more frictionless experience
- Analyzes journey sentiment and weak points to continuously refine services addressing pain points
UCaaS Improves Relationships
UCaaS platforms enhance business-customer relationships in multiple key ways:
- Increased satisfaction scores. UCaaS solutions enable more seamless, contextual customer journeys for interactions that feel personalized and effortless. Integrations provide agents with the complete tools and data to resolve issues faster while self-service options conveniently meet basic customer requests.
- Improved loyalty and retention. Superior experiences via UCaaS capabilities increase brand affinity and customer retention over time, leading to happy customers. Seamless engagements across preferred communication channels make customers more likely to trust and continue patronizing the business.
- Amplified advocacy and referrals. Happier customers who have positive journey experiences are more inclined to leave good reviews, refer friends and family, and amplify the brand across social media.
With UCaaS capabilities facilitating more seamless and satisfying customer journeys, businesses can differentiate their brand with a modern customer service strategy focused on building loyalty.
How Does UCaaS Improve the Employee Experience?
Positive employee experiences are key ingredients enabling companies to reliably deliver excellent customer experiences. UCaaS platforms strive to directly optimize internal personnel experiences across multiple dimensions:
- Workflows
- Collaboration
- Employee engagement
Streamlined Workflows
UCaaS solutions strategically integrate communication channels, data systems, and business workflows into singular cloud environments. Breaking down silos accelerates core business processes that frontline and back office employees rely on to serve the customer.
Enhanced Collaboration
Onboarding all departments into an integrated UCaaS platform fuels seamless messaging, video meetings, and calling between personnel. This UC collaboration provides the foundation for productive cross-functional cooperation, especially for remote employees.
Elevated Engagement
Intuitive interfaces uniting essential functionalities make interactions and accessing data easier for all employees. Instead of disjointed apps, UCaaS platforms enable engaging experiences.
With core components linked into unified cloud architectures, UCaaS solutions enable staff across organizations to achieve peak productivity, enhanced cooperation, and improved effectiveness. The optimization of these workplace experiences drives immense value by catalyzing great customer experiences.
About Symplicity
At Symplicity, we understand the value of unified communications to transform your company. We are experts in the latest communication technologies, service providers, and platforms. When we work with you, we do so as an extension of your team, looking out for your bottom line.
If you’re interested in exploring how a unified communications solution can work for you, let’s talk about it.
Not only can we help you with your UCaaS adoption, but we can also give your invoices a once-over to identify savings. Our technology expense management experts are extremely good at finding redundancy, waste, and (in many cases) money owed to you.
From contact center solutions to networks and mobile device management, we can modernize every aspect of your communications infrastructure.
UCaaS FAQ
What are the 5 types of customer experience?
The 5 types of customer experience are:
- Physical CX
- Emotional CX
- Digital CX
- Journey mapping
- Loyalty and retention
These cover the full spectrum of customer interactions with a company, both online and in-person, as well as their evolving relationship over time.
What is the difference between customer experience and customer service?
CX refers to a customer’s full end-to-end interaction with a company, while customer service focuses more narrowly on support during or after purchases. CX encompasses every touchpoint along the customer journey, aiming to make each interaction as positive and meaningful as possible to drive loyalty.
What are the major benefits of UCaaS and CCaaS?
The major benefits of UCaaS and contact center as a service (CCaaS) are increased flexibility, scalability, and cost savings versus on-premises systems. They allow companies to only pay for what they use, quickly adapt to changing business needs, and provide employees with enterprise-class collaboration and communication tools.
Why is UCaaS so popular?
UCaaS is extremely popular because it delivers enterprise-level collaboration capabilities as a cloud service without large upfront investments. This allows even small businesses to provide video meetings, team chat, file sharing, and more to employees at affordable monthly rates that scale up or down easily.
How many companies use UCaaS?
Over 3 million companies now use UCaaS platforms according to industry analysts, with a market over rate of around 29% per year. The flexibility, scalability, and mobility of cloud-based services are driving the rapid replacement of legacy on-premises systems.
Is Zoom a UCaaS platform?
Zoom provides a feature-rich UCaaS platform that delivers video meetings, team chat, phone services, and webinars via the cloud. It has achieved widespread popularity and boasts over 300,000 business customers using its tools for unified communications.
How do I choose a UCaaS provider?
Important criteria when choosing a UCaaS provider include:
- Reliability
- Implementation support
- Capabilities and integrations
- Security protections
- Mobile app quality
- Ongoing innovation
Compare platforms across these factors to identify the best fit for an organization’s size, industry, use cases, and budget.
