Choosing Your Solution In many cases, selecting the best CCaaS solution is made in conjunction with choosing Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), which is the more general business-class telephony replacement – as opposed to a contact center solution. For more information on UCaaS, please download AVANT’s 6-12 Report on UCaaS. The market is vibrant and continually evolving. “Twenty years ago, customers were really interested in best-of-breed,” said Five9’s Andy Dignan. “Then they went down the path of consolidation to single player vendors that said you need to buy your PBX, your ACD, and your video from the same vendor. There were a lot of large communications vendors that had a great run with that model. But now we’ve transitioned into the cloud space, and you’re seeing a really rapid transition from on-premise to cloud. That was really the first workload in collaboration to get moved to the cloud, which was followed by unified communications and then contact center. “Contact center is the more complex solution of the collaboration stack, which is probably one of the main reasons why it was the last one to make that shift. This takes you to a new round of best of breed because cloud vendors tend to work really well together because of easier integrations with simple APIs,” Dignan added. “A lot of CIOs are starting with their CCaaS solution because there’s a big ROI there. Then they start looking at UCaaS. Ultimately, CIOs need to make sure that their choice in UC integrates very well with their CCaaS environment, in addition to all of their other applications, like CRM.” When choosing either system, engage your operations people to ensure you know their needs and develop a mutual understanding of how the technology can improve their performance, simplify their lives, upgrade customer satisfaction, and enhance overall efficiency. Once this is done, engage the IT team to secure their buy-in. This process will uncover numerous capabilities that map not only to your business, but how people within your business do their jobs. While this exercise is valid for both UCaaS and CCaaS, it’s especially important with CCaaS. When choosing either system, engage your operations people to ensure you know their needs and develop a mutual understanding of how the technology can improve their performance. Copyright © 2021 AVANT Communications, Inc. AVANT | CCaaS 6-12 Report | 19