Enhancing Communication and Collaboration: Unveiling the benefits of UCaaS Solutions

The Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) market is expanding rapidly, with an expected growth rate above 25% over the next five years. This projected growth is not surprising, considering the benefits of UCaaS for IT resellers and their clients.

Organizations in all industries can benefit from streamlining their communications platforms through UCaaS. Thanks to its cloud-based and centralized approach, UCaaS can improve business communication at every level, maximizing its fullest potential.

At its core, UCaaS integrates multiple communication tools and services into a single platform, transforming how unit-specific and cross-functional teams work and collaborate. As a reseller, finding the right solution to implement for customers can help you unlock the communication benefits of UCaaS to maximize the ROI for your clients and your business.

9 Communications and Collaboration Benefits of UCaaS

Effectively selling UCaaS solutions requires a complete understanding of the benefits they offer your customers. Enabling collaboration and communication between teams and across office-based, remote and hybrid work arrangements are key selling points for most modern businesses, along with enhanced customer support and other client-focused features.

Understanding and selling these communication and collaboration benefits of UCaaS helps you better craft your messaging to prospective customers, addressing their core needs and pain points. It also identifies and implements solutions tailored to your clients’ needs, creating a superior customer service experience and greater satisfaction. 

1. Integrate Core Communications Channels

UCaaS shines because of its ability to integrate the core channels your business uses to communicate internally and with its customers. Depending on the solution and implementation process, those channels may include:

• Telephony, including not just making but also recording phone calls and a database of past calls and faxes. Clients who have call centers can also bring them into the UCaaS infrastructure, creating an enhanced, more-streamlined and effective call center experience for both employees and customers.

• Videoconferencing, building on the continually rising trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic toward remote and hybrid work arrangements.

• Text (SMS) messaging for internal and external communications, allowing employees to collaborate with each other over secure lines and enabling businesses to reach their customers via a readily-accesible communication medium customers regularly use.

• Email, either by enhancing legacy business clients like Gmail or Outlook, or by replacing existing email clients with an in-house solution.

• Push notifications to employees’ mobile and desktop devices and through your UCaaS solution’s mobile app.

Related: What is Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS)?

In addition, some UCaaS solutions enable improved document sharing and even collaborative workspaces for your clients, creating an integrated collaboration and communication ecosystem. Instead of managing multiple and disparate communications platforms, your customers can handle all their communications from a centralized dashboard, allowing them to see chat, text, phone calls, shared documents, and more at a glance.

2. Enhance Business Mobility

Despite the clear and ongoing trend toward flexible work environments, businesses need help adjusting to the technological demands imposed by these changes. If you have customers facing these challenges, UCaaS’s ability to enhance business mobility provides an attractive solution.

More specifically, UCaaS can support a hybrid and remote workforce in three distinct ways:

1. Providing multi-channel and immersive communication and collaboration opportunities regardless of location, reducing employee feelings of isolation and distance from co-workers.

2. Creating an office-grade user (and employee) experience regardless of physical location, with access to the same tools and opportunities for all employees.

3. Managing work-life balance issues that can stem from working remotely, through systems designed to make work more efficient and maintain personal-professional boundaries.

UCaaS also enhances business mobility by supporting bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies. Employees can more easily integrate their devices into their daily workflow, easing the transition toward remote work and making the switch more efficient.

3. Drive Cost Efficiencies

As organizations grow, UCaaS solutions can bring increasingly significant cost efficiencies to business operations.

For example, adding phone lines no longer requires payment of line charges or installation fees. Vendor-agnostic solutions enable businesses to seamlessly integrate their existing systems without an upcharge. By incorporating multiple communications channels into a single system, companies can realize economies of scale that reflect positively on their bottom line.

Of course, reselling the right UCaaS solution also brings indirect benefits to your clients. Because they can scale their communications quickly and communicate more efficiently internally and externally, their operating and maintenance expenses decrease, and onboarding time for new hires is also shortened, allowing workers to get up-to-speed rapidly.

4. Scale Communications as Needed

The flexibility of scaling licenses up and down isn’t just a cost efficiency. It also enables your offerings to your clients to flexibly adjust according to their business needs, like accommodating the communications needs of seasonal staff or a surge of customer interaction regarding a special event or other temporary circumstance.

Most business development experts advise that an average annual business growth rate of more than 10% annually is a sign of a healthy, growing business. At this rate, technology solutions must be able to easily grow with users to keep pace with their evolving needs. Conversely, major events like an economic recession or the COVID-19 pandemic show that it’s also necessary to scale down at times.

UCaaS models set themselves apart from their legacy alternatives because they can quickly scale up and down with your customers’ needs. That can even service seasonal businesses that must expand and contract their communications needs multiple times a year. Scalability is one of the core benefits of UCaaS.

5. Build Collaboration to Drive Productivity

Naturally, productivity will be a core concern of any customer looking for enhanced communications solutions. Highly-productive companies have up to 50% higher operating margins than less-productive companies. Unfortunately, internal communication barriers hinder that productivity and lead to frustrating communication experiences for employees, costing businesses an average of $26,000 annually.

UCaaS provides the collaboration foundation necessary to break down those barriers. Providing location- and device-agnostic channels makes it easier for teams and companies of all sizes to work together. The result is a stronger sense of teamwork regardless of the physical environment, leading to improved productivity and performance.

6. Ensure Business Continuity

Disaster can strike at almost any time and for any business. According to one study, 96% of companies experienced at least one significant downtime incident between 2019 and 2022. And yet, only 54% of companies have a well-documented disaster recovery plan.

It could be a hurricane, wildfire, or prolonged power outage. For unprepared businesses, an outage may mean losing important information and the ability to communicate internally and with customers.

But businesses powered by UCaaS platforms can mitigate the worst of these unexpected events. Instead of having to transfer communications to a remote site or having to set up new physical networks for ongoing data transfers and communication, networks are able to rapidly and flexibly switch using UCaaS’s cloud-based solution within minutes. Events that used to take days to recover from, costing businesses their revenue, reputation and overall output, are now resolved in a fraction of the time.

But business continuity goes beyond these short-term needs. By implementing a future-facing communications suite, your customers can ensure that their business is well-prepared for long-term future planning and anticipate technology trends, like the shift toward work-from-home arrangements, long before they occur.

7. Simplify Your Communications Management

Naturally, daily management of the communications ecosystem will be top of mind for many of your customers. UCaaS can provide a solution by building, monitoring, and maintaining the entire structure in a central location.

For instance, automated tools like quoting and billing are native integrations into the tech stack, but the benefits of UCaaS’s centralized solution go beyond these individual features. All services can be managed in a single space, removing the burden on the IT department to sync or manage them separately. That reduces overhead and frees up resources for a more strategic approach to communications management.

Related: How to boost your business with white-label UCaaS

For resellers, these same benefits apply as well; they’re what makes selling UCaaS such a positive opportunity. With the right white-label tool, you can sell multiple services to your customers without needing to manage them separately, relieving the stress and headache of managing various disconnected services requiring disparate management. 

This simplification also passes down to your customers, who can expect more intentional and strategic support from your business.

8. Gain Enhanced Communication Insights

Most organizations will be familiar with data-driven decision-making, a trend that has become commonplace in many industries. Every strategic decision should be made with the tangible information needed to support its validity. 

Too often, however, this approach isn’t yet possible or is difficult to achieve in communications management. Legacy systems, especially individual and channel-based systems, don’t provide the usage and success insights needed to make well-informed decisions, or powerful data capture and analysis tools are too expensive for small- to mid-sized businesses to utilize.

UCaaS allows continuous network monitoring across all channels, enabling tracking of key performance indicators and the overall system. Insights presented on user-friendly dashboards help resellers and their customers remain updated on network health, and the affordability of the solution democratizes data, allowing small- to mid-size players to easily capture and analyze their customers’ usage, giving business owners greater insight into their clients’ needs and pain points.

This data-driven approach to communications networks extends to end users, as well. For example, VoIP phones can provide advanced call analytics to monitor and evaluate the performance of sales calls. More insights mean more informed decision-making, leading to better business growth and success.

9. Centralize Support for Your Communications Infrastructure

We’ve already mentioned the benefits of centralizing communications throughout this guide. But that examination would only be complete with the impact such centralization can have on the support resellers can provide to their clients.

Legacy phone, SMS, email, and other communications platforms will not always run smoothly. And yet, customer support for those areas can lag, if it exists at all. As a reseller of centralized UCaaS solutions, you can provide a point of contact that is responsive to your customers’ communication and collaboration channel needs.

UCaaS is the gateway to advanced customer service for your clients. From a centralized network monitoring dashboard, you can help your customers and answer their questions easily and quickly, setting you apart from MSPs who are still implementing legacy systems for their customers.

How to Offer Flexible UCaaS Solutions that Optimize ROI

The advantages of UCaaS for resellers and their customers are extensive. The right platform, implemented the right way, has the potential to transform your customers’ communication and collaboration experience. But to get there, you have to make sure that you offer the most flexible options possible to receive the greatest return for both your business and your customers.

That means looking for a few features in any UCaaS solution you’re looking to offer your clients:

1. Flexible offerings, allowing your customers to choose which channels they want to integrate into their UCaaS system.

2. A comprehensive white-labeling process that minimizes your work as a reseller while offering a reliable, high-quality solution to your customers.

3. An emphasis on account management and support, which will become your ongoing point of contact in working with your UCaaS vendor.

4. Reliability and security, ideally offering at least 99% uptime and a secure method to implement your solutions.

5. A thorough UCaaS onboarding process making it easy for you to begin quickly selling the solution to your customers.

Now is the perfect time to add UCaaS to your product offerings. Thanks to continued market growth, the opportunity to sell customers on UCaaS’s undeniable benefits is high. Many businesses still rely on legacy systems, giving IT providers an opportunity to offer these businesses more effective alternatives.

SkySwitch is a UCaaS solution designed for resellers, offering white-label communications systems for you to brand as your own, with top-tier support and guidance from our in-house experts. Reach out to our team today to learn more about our products and how we can help you expand your services to customers looking for more integrated, efficient, and flexible communications systems.

Posted in SkySwitch Blog