1. What are some of the customer demands shaping blended UCaaS and CCaaS solutions?
Julien Rio, AVP International Marketing at RingCentral and CCXP: “Streamlining business and operations: fusing UCaaS and CCaaS improves employees’ productivity, as it reduces the number of tools needed to communicate and collaborate. “A unified directory and messaging app enable customer service agents to reach out to experts in other departments. “A stronger ROI: only one contract to manage, one platform to roll out and maintain, resulting in reduced costs. “Being more customer-centric: the combination of UCaaS and CCaaS implies a change of vision from the company, that is more aligned with the new expectations of their customers; being free to use their preferred channel (whether it’s phone or digital), getting faster answers, not being redirected from one channel to another.” Duncan Ward, Chief Executive Office at Enreach UK: “We’ve seen increased demand for hybrid and flexible working solutions that work seamlessly across home and office. “Part of this has been reflected in the fact that people are keen to have strong relationships, with customers and colleagues, regardless of location. “Our dedicated account managers build close relationships with customers to facilitate effective, genuine communication. “Rapid changes in business operations both during and post-pandemic elevated the need for flexible and scalable communication systems. Enreach can easily scale to suit customers’ changing needs. “Customers saw the need for fast, secure business broadband from both home and the office. Broadband needs to be fit for the demands of business, with minimal downtime. Enreach also provides a connectivity backup solution. “Having everything in one place includes integrating apps and having converged communication tools, rather than constantly swapping systems and tools which is inefficient and often results in data loss.” Simon Harrison, Chief Marketing Officer at Avaya: “Technology today is completely changing how we shop, eat, travel, work – everything. “As consumers, we expect our needs to be met before we even have to ask. So, how can organizations meet the ever-rising expectations of their customers?
“To start, experiences need to be personalized, connected, intuitive, and informed — how you make people feel matters most and will be remembered.
“Experiences also need to be consistent across voice and non-voice channels like email, chat, and web collaboration. “Matching customers to the right employees means using business rules, internal and external context, and desired business outcomes. “This can be done across the entire organization, from the front line to subject matter experts to back-office personnel. “Regardless of where a person sits in a company, communicating with customers and other organizations needs to be a consistently great experience. “It’s not just about a back-and-forth exchange but finding ways to truly collaborate.” Richard McPhee, Solutions Director at Gamma: “The biggest driver is the need for simplicity. Buying solutions from multiple sources and integrating them can seem complex. “Through this desire for simplicity, we are beginning to see some innovations across blended UCaaS and CCaaS that complement customers' needs. “Recent consumer sentiment trends have shown that 75% of customers expect businesses to maintain information about their past interactions, while 59% say they’ll end a transaction if contact becomes too much effort. “In fact, a staggering two-thirds of customers have to repeat themselves to different representatives. “Let’s face it, this is a basic demand that cannot be ignored - especially when the technology is available, scalable, and easily deployed by the right provider. “Using blended solutions is enabling new end-to-end use cases such as "Customer Swarming" where experts from all over a business can contribute to a customer resolution to help the advisor. “Customer experience is becoming more complex but, in the same breath, blended solutions are getting smarter, simpler, and connecting the dots.”
2. What are the challenges you are facing in creating/delivering UCaaS and CCaaS for enhanced customer interactions?
Julien Rio, AVP International Marketing at RingCentral and CCXP: “Moving to the cloud: while there is a massive transition to the cloud, not all companies already moved to the cloud for their CC and UC tools. This is the first step of the UCaaS and CCaaS integration. “Siloed organisations: integrating UCaaS and CCaaS together requires breaking technological silos within a company. “Resistance to change: once you have the solutions in place, you need to make sure employees understand the benefits of the change “Empowering employees: this integration requires companies to trust employees, especially CX agents, so they can.” Duncan Ward, Chief Executive Office at Enreach UK: “One of the biggest challenges has been ensuring there is appropriate infrastructure for businesses and home working. “Not everyone is equipped with reliable broadband that can cope with the demands of UCaaS or CCaaS. “It’s also important to ensure that business employees have a proper set up at home so they can work effectively if they want, but also ensuring they have an appropriate workplace to come into. “For further customer communications, we encourage the use of other technologies. This includes implementing chatbots for FAQs or automated menus to help redirect queries. “We want to deliver high-quality solutions for customers to help them get the right answer fast. We want to ensure that staff and customers have multiple communication methods available. “Our aim is to reduce over-reliance on email and encourage people to call for quicker solutions.” Simon Harrison, Chief Marketing Officer at Avaya: “Keeping employees motivated to improve responsiveness and the overall customer experience are challenges for any organization. “Empowering your employees is key — to serve multiple customer interactions simultaneously, to receive data from multiple sources (including CRM and business systems), to have a consolidated view of the customer journey. “More so, it’s time to break down departmental silos and bring customer and employee experiences together by adding UCaaS to any solution. “Employees can benefit from an intuitive, composable desktop that offers blended voice and digital communications, with file sharing, task management, and virtual team rooms. “And it enables customer-facing employees to quickly connect with subject matter experts located outside of the contact center to quickly resolve customer problems or inquiries during interactions, in real-time.” Richard McPhee, Solutions Director at Gamma: “Changing mindsets. It’s natural to want to improve customer interactions by focusing solely on the customer. “In most cases, businesses should start with the user. Employee experience is critical to a successful CX strategy. “The bad news? The UK’s contact centre attrition rate sits at 26%. How do you implement a successful, consistent strategy when you’re losing one-quarter of your team annually?
“Discover what tools they’re missing. What functions would your teams like access to? How do they think you could update your CX approach? What’s going to make their job easier and ultimately more enjoyable?
“For example, a single application that houses and manages all customer engagement data means employees no longer need to keep mental tabs on separate applications. This EX improvement filters through to CX. “Start garnering employee feedback to coordinate CX across your entire enterprise. “The people on the frontline of your business, armed with this type of blended technology, are in prime position to enhance those all-important customer interactions.”
