UC Round Table: UCaaS and CCaaS

In the dynamic landscape of modern business communications, the convergence of UCaaS and CCaaS heralds a transformative shift. From enhancing customer experiences to optimising internal collaboration, merging UCaaS and CCaaS promises to redefine organisational comms strategies. It’s invaluable to examine the synergies, challenges, and future implications of their integration.

With our latest Round Table subject, “UCaaS and CCaaS”, we spoke with experts and executives from Bright Pattern, Zoom, Avaya, GoTo and Vonage about the primary benefits of integrating UCaaS and CCaaS solutions, the main challenges and obstacles from merging the two, how emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning, and automation will influence the context, and what trends will shape the continued evolution of integrated UCaaS and CCaaS offerings.

What are the primary benefits organizations can expect from integrating UCaaS and CCaaS solutions?

Michael McCloskey, CEO of Bright Pattern

For McCloskey, by integrating UCaaS and CCaaS, companies are able to offer customers a more seamless communication experience. “Customers can reach agents through the channel of their choice and easily switch between channels based on their preferences,” McCloskey expanded.

“With presence and directory integration, agents are able to find knowledge workers and experts to help resolve complex customer problems, while employees can locate the optimal leading to faster resolutions and improved CSAT,” he continued.

Neal McMahon, Regional Sales Leader at Avaya

McMahon highlighted that, fundamentally, a UCaaS solution is about employee experience and a CCaaS solution is about customer experience.

“However, there is an interdependence between delivering outstanding CX and fostering a positive EX,” McMahon said. “A positive EX, characterised by a supportive work culture and access to enabling tools and technologies, empowers employees to deliver their best work, directly enhancing CX.”

McMahon suggested that, by adopting an integrated approach between EX and CX, businesses can transform customer satisfaction and employee engagement into “catalysts for revenue generation, market differentiation, and competitive advantage”.

David Evans, VP of Product Development at GoTo

Evans noted that the benefits of integrating UCaaS and CCaaS depend on the size and operational model of a business’s Contact Center.

“All businesses benefit from better pricing and simplified support of using a single vendor, but it’s the businesses that enable their contact centre to work directly with their back-office staff that will get the most benefit,” Evans said.

“In this setup, the Contact Center is not the sole custodian of the customer experience. Instead, the whole company plays a part in delivering a great customer experience: faster resolutions, better customer satisfaction, and, most importantly, more loyal customers. So, you need a suite of tools that not only make this possible but make it effortless.”

Evans purported that a single solution, and ideally one where the Contact Center and back-office share the same voice and digital platform, empowers “seamless, low-latency call transfers, simple presence synchronization, and easy address book integration”.

“There is also a significant benefit to vendors that have built on a single platform as you typically get faster development of new features, more converged solutions, better reporting, and improved omnichannel experiences,” Evans continued. “Choosing a vendor that has the right approach will make sure that the business stays at the front of what’s possible in the future.”

Carlos Aragon, Senior Director of Applications Product Marketing at Vonage

Aragon observed that, while office employees, remote contact centre staff and other areas of the business that rely on effective communication and collaboration may not always interact with each other, the tools they use should.

“In today’s digital world, business success has a direct correlation to experiences created for customers and employees,” Aragon explained. “UCaaS consolidates employee communications tools (voice, video and messaging) into a single platform, while CCaaS optimizes omnichannel customer interactions with advanced conversation routing, CRM integrations, AI-powered agent assistance and AI-driven insights, offering personalized engagement.”

When CCaaS and UCaaS are combined, Aragon affirms, companies ensure seamless communication across every touchpoint, driving better experiences, agility, increased productivity and customer loyalty.

“By teaming with a trusted provider that offers complementary UCaaS and CCaaS systems in a single, cloud-based solution, companies unlock more value— simplifying workflows, saving on costs, and scaling to meet business demands,” Aragon expanded. “With these advantages, businesses are in a far better position to meet the evolving demands for customer experience while keeping employees engaged.”

Ben Neo, Head of Zoom Contact Center and CX Sales, EMEA

Neo warned that companies need to be cautious when merging the two because starting the process can seem overwhelming, so advises that a good first port of call is to evaluate a company’s CX strategy to identify the need for a single-platform solution.

“Security and network services are the main challenges faced, so IT teams should focus on these areas first to ensure their UCaaS and CCaaS solutions are successfully delivering on business goals,” Neo said. “Maintaining consistent service globally and managing network performance can also create obstacles. With both UCaaS and CCaaS being mission-critical, poor service levels can quickly impact business operations by negatively impacting productivity and customer experience.”

Neo also highlighted that integrating platforms from a single provider makes implementation less challenging, with “easier management, better visibility and fewer integration issues”.

In your opinion, what are the main challenges or obstacles companies might encounter when merging UCaaS and CCaaS services or platforms?

David Evans, VP of Product Development at GoTo

Evans cited several challenges that can arise that businesses should plan for. “Connecting solutions from different vendors is very challenging, so it’s usually best to avoid doing so, as the complexity and accountability for issues are hard to navigate,” he explained.

“Choosing a single vendor is not without its hurdles either, changing both UCaaS and CCaaS solutions at the same time is an overhead for IT departments that can seem daunting,” Evans continued. “In our experience, this is still a thoroughly worthwhile exercise to go through, as the long-term benefits quickly outweigh the short-term effort.”

Carlos Aragon, Senior Director of Applications Product Marketing at Vonage

Aragon noted that many companies have maintained separate solutions for unified communications and contact centres, which is “a reflection of their own functional organization that creates inefficiencies in the delivery of seamless customer journeys and frustrations for employees”, he said.

“The uneven distribution of efforts that businesses place on customer vs employee experiences often leads to frustration, complexity, repetition, additional effort in digital engagement, and delays in getting things done,” Aragon added.

He also highlighted that more and more modern businesses realise that maintaining separate tools can prevent them from building engaging customer and employee experiences, and also that this disconnect can “ultimately hurt the bottom line”.

“A single vendor that leverages a common, flexible platform where a fully integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution can work in harmony across various departments and scale up or down as needed eliminates the challenges for businesses looking to consolidate their tech stacks,” Aragon underlined.

Ben Neo, Head of Zoom Contact Center and CX Sales, EMEA

Neo argued that an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution makes it easier for staff to collaborate across the organisation and for customers to contact the appropriately skilled person to assist them with their queries.

“Integrating UCaaS and CCaaS platforms offers organisations a comprehensive solution for perfecting workflows, empowering agents and enhancing overall business insight and performance,” Neo said. “Security and agility benefits – as well as customer and employee experience improvements – are typically seen from the outset.”

Neo expanded, noting that the advantages go broader as it enhances operational efficiency by providing a unified communication platform for internal teams and customer-facing agents, leading to faster call resolution and improved customer satisfaction.

“Using a single vendor for both solutions also streamlines app usage, reducing time spent toggling between programs and simplifying the employee training process,” Neo clarified. “By combining communications into a single bundle, organisations can also reduce the costs and complexity of managing multiple vendors, therefore reducing pressures on the IT team and budgets.”

Neo cited recent research that businesses that take a single MultiCaaS approach decrease their operational costs by 18 percent and increase revenue by 22.6 percent on average.

“For internal teams, a MultiCaaS solution helps to deliver an enhanced service with easy access to back-office experts and advanced technology like Generative AI – which can simultaneously improve call handling efficiency and customer experience,” he said.

Michael McCloskey, CEO of Bright Pattern

McCloskey noted that merging UCaaS and CCaaS offers several benefits but requires careful consideration of the specific strategies, use cases, and changes in employee behaviour.

“Companies must provide comprehensive training to help users understand the new system and its benefits to ensure smooth and rapid adoption,” McCloskey observed. “On the technical side, the integration of UCaaS and CCaaS requires careful planning to ensure such things as API compatibility, data privacy, and security measures to protect sensitive data.”

“When done properly, companies can provide customers, agents and employees with a great communication framework that delivers a superior customer experience,” he added.

Neal McMahon, Regional Sales Leader at Avaya

McMahon highlighted that delivering modern CX and EX is challenging, given the seamless integration of diverse communication channels, maintaining consistency across digital and physical touchpoints, and ensuring data privacy and security in an increasingly regulated environment.

“IT leaders must also navigate the intricacies of legacy systems integration, cloud migration, and the deployment of AI/ML technologies, all while ensuring uptime, scalability, and compliance with global standards,” McMahon explained.

“For many organisations, the prospect of making an abrupt change from existing communication infrastructure carries high risks, including potential disruptions to operations and service continuity. This fear of instability hinders innovation and the ability to drive new business outcomes.”

McMahon underlined the importance for organisations to realise there is an alternative to “rip and replace”, which is “innovation without disruption”. This means “building upon what already works — leveraging familiar processes, systems, and technologies — as a foundation for introducing new innovations”.

What role do you see emerging technologies such as AI, machine learning, and automation playing in the merged UCaaS and CCaaS space?

Ben Neo, Head of Zoom Contact Center and CX Sales, EMEA

Neo highlighted that using virtual assistants to guide users through complex tasks is now commonplace and generative AI tools are already being used widely for more intuitive self-service solutions. Meanwhile, brands are also committing to advanced conversational AI solutions for in-depth insights and analytics, Neo affirms.

“As AI and machine learning tools become more advanced, we’re likely to see more of these innovations being applied in combined CCaaS and UCaaS platforms to create more personalised experiences,” Neo said. “Many organisations are already experimenting with bot builders, which allow them to create self-service tools for staffers using UCaaS and also for their customers’ benefit.”

Neo underlined that the industry will see more examples of Advanced AI solutions being incorporated into CCaaS and UCaaS platforms to help improve business insight. “Companies will use these to understand how staff user experiences and behaviour affect the customer experience,” he said. “We’ll also see them being used alongside in-depth analytics for strategic and planning activities.”

Carlos Aragon, Senior Director of Applications Product Marketing at Vonage

Aragon noted that AI utilises machine learning to analyze vast amounts of data quickly, providing companies with real-time insights and personalized customer experiences, driving new levels of collaboration and productivity.

“AI is used today in UCaaS and CCaaS to eliminate background noise in voice calls, and natural language processing and understanding provide high-quality call transcription, live captions, and conversation analysis to identify customer mood and enable insights from service analytics,” Aragon expounds.

“Automation (also powered by AI/ML) takes over repetitive tasks, improving response times and allowing agents to focus on more complex customer inquiries,” he added. “This year, AI co-pilots will improve customer experiences and enable better decision-making by recommending the next best actions and improving customer experiences, as well as presenting recommended articles from knowledge repositories, suggesting automatic/templated responses, or summarizing customer interactions.”

Aragon also highlighted that all of these technologies combined empower advanced features like virtual assistants, 24/7 chatbots, and intelligent call routing.

Michael McCloskey, CEO of Bright Pattern

For McCloskey, adding AI capabilities to an organisation’s integrated UCaaS/CCaaS framework can create a powerful platform for communication and collaboration.

“This includes Chatbots for routine tasks, virtual assistants, sentiment analysis, transcription and summarization, and other generative AI technologies,” McCloskey explained. “By utilising these capabilities companies can offer agent/customer assist suggestions, automatically score conversations, deploy teleprompter functionality, provide real-time coaching, and more.”

McCloskey affirms that AI, machine learning, and automation have the potential to transform the merged UCaaS and CCaaS landscape by automating routine tasks, enhancing customer experience, and boosting agent efficiency.

Neal McMahon, Regional Sales Leader at Avaya

McMahon stressed that the application of AI/ML to customer and employee engagement solutions should embody pragmatism and safety.

“The focus must be on enhancing efficiency, personalisation, and insight without compromising security or privacy,” McMahon emphasised. “This careful balance ensures that businesses can leverage the power of AI to optimise their operations and customer interactions while maintaining trust and compliance with data protection regulations.”

David Evans, VP of Product Development at GoTo

Evans observed that AI, machine learning and automation already play a part in UCaaS and CCaaS separately. However, he underscored that when systems merge, all three are critical to ensure a seamless integration.

“When it comes to AI specifically, having a single vendor for UCaaS and CCaaS is essential,” Evans said. “AI is deeply transformative to our industry, but you need to apply AI consistently across your entire customer experience. Otherwise, you will miss out on some of the benefits and, worse, offer a disjointed and confusing experience to both customers and staff.”

Evans argued that applying AI once across the whole UCaaS and CCaaS experience leads to faster adoption, deeply amplifies the benefits, and presents better value for money. “It’s also much cheaper for vendors to add AI once to a single UCaaS and CCaaS stack and have the benefits apply to all employees,” he continued.

What trends do you predict will shape the continued evolution of integrated UCaaS and CCaaS offerings?

Neal McMahon, Regional Sales Leader at Avaya

McMahon predicted that the language will change because using “UCaaS platform” or “CCaaS platform” is “siloed labelling”, which he states isn’t helpful to business leaders as they face the dual challenge of delivering outstanding CX and excellent EX to drive business growth.

“They don’t care if there is an integration between UCaaS and CCaaS,” McMahon said. “They are just focusing on gaining positive business outcomes. Equally, a customer on their CX journey or an employee trying to connect to colleagues doesn’t care what the technology ‘plumbing’ is. They just need to be mapped to the right person quickly and effectively.”

“Instead, the conversation will evolve into talking about the ‘experience platform’, as taking a holistic approach to CX and EX frames them not as siloed technologies with separate costs to be minimised but as pivotal opportunities for business growth,” McMahon concluded.

David Evans, VP of Product Development at GoTo

Evans suggested that AI is certainly the “main influence on our industry” and, “as mentioned, I see this shaping the future for all vendors and could see UCaaS vendors who have added and integrated CCaaS into their existing platform emerge as the next wave of advanced CX solutions”.

Outside of AI, Evans said, the seamless omnichannel experiences that blend contact centre agents and knowledge workers from the back office will continue to drive the adoption of single vendor platforms. In addition, Evans believes that having a single reporting platform, which drives visibility of the customer experience across the entire organization, is going to be critical.

“We should also expect to see the cost benefits of a single UCaaS/CCaaS vendor continue to play a part, given the economic pressures that still exist,” Evans continued. “As this technology reaches an accessible price point, we can expect to see continued international expansion, especially in emerging markets.”

Michael McCloskey, CEO of Bright Pattern

McCloskey highlighted that the quest for a seamless customer experience will continue to drive companies to integrate their UCaaS and CCaaS platforms. “AI will play an important role in such things as chatbots, virtual assistants, intent analysis, auto-scoring of interactions, AI routing, and agent-assist tools for suggestions,” he said.

“By embracing these emerging trends, companies can implement an integrated UCaaS and CCaaS strategy to enhance CX/EX, improve operational efficiency, and gain a competitive edge in the marketplace,” McCloskey expanded.

Ben Neo, Head of Zoom Contact Center and CX Sales, EMEA

For Neo, AI-based innovations are likely to drive numerous commercial and operation enhancements for UCasS and CCaaS offerings.

“The combination with other applications and software solutions through new platforms should also allow businesses to become more versatile, improve productivity and deliver more streamlined customer and employee experiences alongside potential new revenue streams,” Neo clarified.

He also stressed that businesses will also benefit from a stronger degree of scalability and flexibility and an ability to create highly efficient workflow automations, allowing the streamlining of call centres and other commercial activities to speed up productivity and provide deep customer insights.

Additionally, there will also be a clear security benefit with combined platforms providing enhanced security, data management and compliance functionalities.

“We’re likely to see integrated offerings providing these benefits very quickly from implementation and creating significant contributions to a business’s commercial expansion,” Neo said. “But from a commercial perspective, we’ll continue to see constant pressures on cost, and this will shape companies’ decisions to consolidate their services onto more complete platforms.”

Carlos Aragon, Senior Director of Applications Product Marketing at Vonage

Aragon noted that we’re currently seeing the consolidation of communications channels continue to impact all industries. “Over the last several years, organizations of all sizes have reaped the benefits of the convergence of unified communications and contact centre solutions,” he added.

As our work-from-anywhere model continues to dominate the way we work, Aragon argues that companies have to think beyond solutions and consider how to deliver the needs of customers, employees, and agents — all from a single platform.

“The ongoing adoption of AI and ML will continue to impact this evolution of integrated UCaaS and CCaaS, enhancing personalization capabilities and predictive analytics,” he said. “Omnichannel communication is also on the rise and consumers continue to demand seamless communication across favorite channels.”

“The emphasis on data security and privacy is another key trend as more focus is placed on ensuring sensitive data is protected and compliant with global regulations. All of these trends point to a future where the combination of UCaaS and CCaaS solutions is table stakes.”