Automated Transcript
Welcome back again. I’m joined by our resident expert, Martin Korner.
Hi, Richard.
Today we’re going to be talking about the synergies of CCaaS and UCaaS tooling. So, let’s just jump right in, shall we? This is a topic that comes around again and again, and it’s becoming more prolific in the industry. Maybe five years ago, there was a stat flying around that 70% of organisations were buying and consuming their CCaaS services from their UCaaS provider.
That was a really interesting stat at the time because I didn’t really see the substance behind it. But now we’re seeing it more and more evolve in the market and the messaging. I was just wondering, what is your take on whether an organisation should be buying their contact centre suite integrated with their UCaaS suite?
Yeah. So, I think sometimes that’s the right solution. Sometimes that’s the right thing to do. But I think what you need to do is take it back to the needs of the users. So, your staff who are working with that software, what are their requirements? Quite often, we find that the requirements of the back-office team who are on your UCaaS solution are not the same as the requirements of your contact centre team, who will be on your CCaaS solution. It’s really important that those tools integrate with each other.
They’re not completely separate teams, but you are going to see differences, and that’s reflected from the licensing perspective as well. Your licensing is going to be much more expensive on your CCaaS solution compared to your UCaaS solution. A UCaaS solution might be something simple like Microsoft Teams with calling license.
It doesn’t need to do a lot; it just needs to be able to make phone calls, see the presence of other staff members, basic chat, things like that. A CCaaS solution is much more complicated. That’s where you need really detailed key performance management. You need agent performance management, workforce management, integrations into different systems. You need to really present that agent with a single pane of glass, where they can see everything they need to see about that customer at the time when they need it.
So, they are very different tools. I think in some businesses you’ll be able to use the same tool across both. They’ll use the same provider across both. But right now, where the market is, I think we see a lot of the time that, at least for the organisations we work with, it doesn’t always make sense to use the same tools and provider.
Yeah, it’s great. We see something similar as well where it’s different scenarios for customer experience and CCaaS. Sometimes when we’re asked for a CCaaS solution, organisations approach it as just one tool for anything that remotely resembles a customer contact centre or high volume, such as internal service desks, etc. Internal functions tend to sit quite well on a blended UCaaS environment, but as you say, in different environments where the CCaaS is trying to deliver different services to a different audience, they can be different contexts and it doesn’t always quite work. They need more sophisticated tooling and they’re less likely to bring back-office staff onto a front-office call.
The terms like agent swarming, etc., I’ve seen that work very well in some industries. So, it’s quite interesting. I think what we’re agreeing on is that this is a bit “horses for courses,” really, isn’t it? It’s probably not a one-size-fits-all objective.
Yeah. It’s interesting you mentioned about agent swarming. I think, as you said, it can work really well in certain circumstances. But where you’ve got distributed teams that might be in different time zones, or the back-office staff might just not be available at that time to help with the problem. So, it’s about balancing it and working out what’s right for the specific organisation.
Do you see a moment in time where these two technologies will come together and you just buy one thing? In the evolving world of technology, is that likely to change?
Yeah. So, I do see it moving in that direction. I don’t think we’re quite there yet. But with the major players in the industry, they’ve all now got tools on both sides. So, they’ve got UCaaS and they’ve got CCaaS offerings. They’re not necessarily both as advanced as each other just yet. So, I think there’s a way to go with them. But I think in the future, this conversation will change very much.
Yeah, that’s really interesting. On a completely side note but very much related, it’s always been quite curious that the likes of Amazon AWS don’t have their own CRM tooling. I met with one of the product managers at their Reinvent conference in Las Vegas. We had a few chats at the end of it, and we were talking about it. Essentially, he was saying that when you go to the world of cloud, because at the core of the world of cloud is data. It’s all about data. The way databases and information are spread across a cloud environment can be, at times, unstructured and dotted around. The value in it is actually starting to pool that information and surface it at the right time. In that kind of world, mixed with contact centres and building blocks, if you like, you tend to start to not require that information. It always makes me think of the Roblox generation, building, filling parts of code and building stuff, almost crafting, if you like.
Do you think that’s going to be the future of technology? Do you think crafting your own communication solutions is something that is going to come around and be an advent, and then we are going to start to see the world and the lines blur between CRM, UCaaS, and CCaaS to more just communication suites?
Yeah, to an extent. I think what we see right now are very specialised tools in each of these areas. So, an organisation will procure a specialist CRM system, specialist workforce management, all these different tools that work really well in their own specific area. The important thing is that they integrate really well with the contact centre solution and the UCaaS solution as well.
I think that’s the important bit, that these systems all integrate really well. There’s no point having separate systems that don’t talk to each other, that have their own copies of information. You can’t really work like that. In the future, will more of these move to be within the providers? Potentially.
So, we’ve spoken a lot about UCaaS, CCaaS, CRM, and all that, but how do these all tie together, and how did we get to the point of buying from one vendor?
I think there are critical points around how they tie together. One is that they do need to tie together. From your front-office staff or your contact centre staff, if they need to get in touch with your back-office staff, they need to be able to see whether the team are online, be able to quickly transfer calls to them, speak to them, get the information they need, share tickets with them, share case management, share the same CRM with them. So, they’re sharing all the information. But the other side of it is the customers. They’re both working with the same customers. So, it’s coming back to that customer experience. That’s the key thing. These tools are there to solve customer experience problems and really drive up that customer experience. So, I think that’s where they need to come together.
Problem resolution happens faster when someone has access to all of the information about that customer. Having that full 360-degree view of the customer based on all the touchpoints throughout the organisation, like you mentioned earlier, is probably key to the agent being able to understand who they’re speaking to on the call and how they want to be dealt with so they can get to that problem resolution much quicker.
Exactly. So, the agent can see when the last contact was, whether there are other open cases at the moment. But also, in that transfer to the back office, for the back office to see that the customer has passed ID verification, see those open cases again, see all the information about the customer and what’s been discussed so far. That’s the important stuff, so that customers don’t have those frustrating experiences where they’re going through the IVR process multiple times, being asked for their account number again, even though they’ve already provided it to someone else. That’s where it gets really frustrating and adds a lot of friction and time. If we can remove those by transferring that context as well as the call, that’s where it really adds value.
Okay. So, if I was to summarise our conversation today, and see if you agree with me, what we’re saying here is that the world of CCaaS and UCaaS tooling are coming together and melding. But the most important part here is the customer and actually getting the viewpoints correct to resolve things much better and having contextual information flow between them. So, maybe it’s not as important to buy from the same vendor, but making sure at least you can surface the right information at the right time in the right way. If that’s what we’re seeing, then a great point to stick on here is that organisations who are maybe trying to make a saving by buying tooling from the same vendor should really start to go back to their strategy and make sure they’re going to execute upon this, because otherwise, it might be a false saving and a false economy. They might save on the tooling but at the expense of their strategy.
Exactly. It can be a false economy. It depends on what those objectives are, what those goals are, but it doesn’t always balance out.
Alright. Well, Martin, it’s been a pleasure again. Thank you very much, everyone.
