The blurring of the line between unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) and contact centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) has caused consternation for many resellers, according to Xarios MD Robin Russell.
Russell told UC Today that the industry is clamouring to add CCaaS functionality to existing UCaaS platforms, citing Zoom’s recent attempt to acquire Five9 as an example of the increasing popularity of these types of combined solutions.
“From a reseller perspective, there is a confusion between what is UCaaS and what is CCaaS and at what point does one become the other?” he said.
“Basically, once resellers understand that UCaaS features are there to enhance internal communications and CCaaS features are to enhance the external communication with customers, it simplifies it somewhat.”
“For example, our CCaaS solution is just an optional overlay onto our UCaaS platform. There’s no mystery behind it – and there shouldn’t be any mystery behind it – because most of these resellers are used to selling contact centre-based platforms. It’s not that complicated, it just sounds like a very specialist area, with a very complicated solution that they should run away from and leave to the larger resellers.”
Xarios’ Dimensions Voice offering is a UCaaS solution which offers a full cloud UCaaS suite. It provides resellers with the option to enable our Contact Centre Pro to the UCaaS platform, enabling selected users to be agents in complex routing and reporting scenarios. Setting up a contact centre in Dimensions Voice takes only a few minutes, with a full omni-channel soon to be integrated into the solution.
Contact Centre Pro offers ACD queues, call routing strategies, such as Most Idle and Skills-Based routing, supervisors, and real-time wallboards that provide service-level visibility with on-screen gauges and visual alerts when sla’s or targets are missed.
“It gives our resellers and their customers that option to move to a CCaaS environment as and when they choose,” Russell explained.
“It’s not a different product that you’ve got to migrate TO, or an entirely different infrastructure – it’s just there as an enablement for select users that deal with the end customer.”
Xarios’ CCaaS offering differs from similar products in the market in that it is a “voice-first” solution and that its real value is in the service and strength these voice features provide to both the UCaaS and CCaaS users of the platform.
“From a product perspective, I struggle to find a significant differentiation across all the major CCaaS players in the market, to be honest,” he stated.
“But the differentiation comes down to working with us, our history of working in that market and the support that we give resellers.”
Dimensions Voice offers a truly resilient platform that is designed with the expectation that anything can and will go wrong. Dimensions Voices’ resiliency utilises multiple primaries, which enables any server to accept a change and that change will then be replicated across the cluster of servers, which allows a customer’s operations to keep going even if the data centre fails.
“Our entire platform is resilient; the Dimensions Voice contact centre inherits that resiliency as well,” said Russell.
“From a resiliency perspective, we don’t prioritise one part of the product over the other – which does happen. Some people don’t think it matters if statistics or wallboards go down as long as all the other features work. But that’s not the case with contact centres, they can’t have gaps in it.”
