Integrating UCaaS and CCaaS solutions is the latest hot trend to sweep across the CX space. In the last year alone, leading UC and contact centre vendor RingCentral has recorded a 500% growth in its Microsoft Teams integration. That's because UCaaS is arguably the best calling option for Teams (learn more about that in this webinar next week).
Yet, many CCaaS vendors are also developing UCaaS capabilities of their own, and traditional UC players are establishing partnerships across the contact centre space.
So, what is the catalyst behind this emerging trend?
Of course, the need for enhanced communication in remote environments – necessitated by the pandemic – played its part. However, from a broader CX perspective, there are many more reasons why bundling these solutions is a significant win. Here are five excellent examples.
1. Foster Cross-Function Collaboration
When companies approach CX as a team sport, where different departments work together to break down journey siloes, it often functions best.
Typically, the intelligence behind this strategy stems from the contact centre. After all, it is the contact centre that captures feedback, disposition data, and many customer metrics. Through analysis, pain points come to the fore.
Sharing this knowledge across the UC platform, CX teams can foster collaboration between relevant departments, encouraging them to work together through a UCaaS-enabled community. As Louise Newbury-Smith, UK Country Manager at RingCentral, says:
“When everyone shares goals and collaborates to translate a mutual CX vision into values, processes, and behaviours, win-win outcomes for customers and companies are much more likely”
Yet, collaboration does more than smooth over CX frictions. Working together helps maximize the value of customer insights, inspire innovation, and ensure consistency.
2. Create a Unified View of CX
CCaaS solutions mine customer insights, with prominent providers offering reporting, analytics, and voice of the customer (VoC) tools. Meanwhile, UCaaS solutions provide dashboards to share insights across the organization. Combining these capabilities offers the potential for a unified view of CX.
Again, this transparency unleashes the potential for collaboration, driving customer-centricity across the enterprise. Yet, it also enables a single source of truth that paints a clear picture of performance for various departments, the CX team, and the c-suite.
Such a dashboard should display both real-time and historical metrics intrinsically linked with the company vision and strategy. If so, everyone works towards the same tangible goals and can celebrate successes together.
3. Engage in Knowledge Sharing
Knowledge management is no longer the process of storing information and passing it to agents to solve customer queries. Now, it has another layer: sharing knowledge content across the organization to inspire process improvement. Document sharing features within a UCaaS solution facilitate this strategy.
For instance, perhaps the contact centre knowledge base includes an article that supports agents dealing with a common complaint regarding a particular design flaw. Such content is helpful, but maybe it is better in the hands of product designers, who can address the issue in new models to ensure customer satisfaction.
Building on this example, Newbury-Smith says:
“With automated ticket tagging – made possible by speech analytics – contact centres can accurately quantify the costs that such problems generate. These statistics are often eye-watering and inspire action”
Going further, companies can extend this strategy to maximise knowledge stored across the entire enterprise, engaging suppliers and third-party support too.