If you’re considering an upgrade to your communications and collaboration systems, you may be spending a lot of time sorting through the most popular options:

• Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS)
• Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
• Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS)

There’s enough overlap in these solutions to make choosing between them a bit confusing. However, they aren’t the same technology, nor do they address the same needs in your organization. Below, we’ll share a quick description of each technology and what benefits you can expect to see if you implement them:

UCaaS: This solution delivers communication and collaboration features in a cloud service, enabling employees to access a variety of formats in a single app, including videoconferencing and shared workspaces. UCaaS has been a go-to solution for companies trying to equip work-from-home employees with secure, high-performance communication features. The benefits you can expect from UCaaS include:

• Cost savings
• The ability to ease your IT team’s workload, because the provider handles all maintenance, updates, and troubleshooting
• Scalability as your organization grows or to address seasonality
• Support for geographically dispersed work teams

CCaaS: Developed as a solution to handle the complexities of a contact center, CCaaS handles applications like interactive voice response systems, workforce management, and transcription services, all through cloud-based solutions. Many of the benefits from CCaaS are similar to those associated with UCaaS, but they’re more customer-focused, so they can improve customer service in addition to cost savings, scalability, flexibility, and provider support.

CPaaS: A cloud-based solution for adding communications features to business solutions, CPaaS is delivered through standards-based APIs, Java, .NET libraries, or SDKs, as well as low- or no-code tools.

There are two ways that companies generally access CPaaS. You can either build applications using vendor-supplied APIs, or use CPaaS APIs to equip apps with communication tools for improving business processes.

The benefits of CPaaS include:

• customizable features for use in apps
• cost savings related to infrastructure and administration
• in-house support from developers
• quicker time to market for apps.

CPaaS is most commonly used for functions like appointment reminders and two-factor authentication.

Some UCaaS providers have begun offering integration with CCaaS and CPaaS as a way to break down communication silos in organizations. This cohesive approach allows a contact center agent to access the expertise of a line-of-business manager to answer a customer inquiry without moving between applications, for instance.

If your business is considering a communications upgrade, contact us at eXemplify. We can assist you in evaluating UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS solutions to determine which technology offers the features and benefits you need.