Better Together: Integrate UCaaS & CCaaS to Improve Customer Experience

It’s not supposed to be this way.
Software meant to bring your teams together is keeping them siloed. Apps designed to help your business respond to customer needs are sending them to competitors.
The adoption of unified communications as a service (UCaaS) tools increased dramatically with COVID-19. Companies suddenly had to find a way 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.
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,” a new e-book from Nextiva and Five9, examines these problems and presents a practical solution.

The price of disconnected UCaaS and CCaaS

The customer experience environment is only getting more complex.
New 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 each 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.
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 business success. A customer-first world demands an integrated approach. It’s essential for understanding customers and improving internal collaboration.

Great things happen when you integrate UCaaS and CCaaS

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 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 been found to achieve increased revenue and a 56% improvement in customer service ratings.
The good news is that UCaaS and CCaaS can come together. Nextiva is helping businesses achieve it in partnership with Five9.
Using Nextiva Contact Center, an integrated solution that links with its unified communications platform, agents can field calls, chats, and emails using omnichannel features while staying in sync with colleagues.
When 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:

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

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

The future of UCaaS and CCaaS is here

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

• How businesses scale with cloud communication solutions
• Why segmented communication hurts customer experience
• How to integrate UCaaS and CCaaS platforms
• The future of the contact center

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