Not a PBX Upgrade: “It’s All About Customer Experience” UCaaS can be characterized as a toolkit to provide a range of business communications that supports colleagues, vendors, partners, and customers. To that end, enterprise decision makers will want to evaluate the opportunity at two levels. Level one: how the different constituencies interact under the current circumstances – often phone and email. Level two: how they might interact with a wider variety of available feature sets such as collaboration texts, etc. The variations between the two levels will be based upon the specific circum- stances, so companies should evaluate where they stand at the outset of the engagement. This will be the first step in considering the opportunity. Thus, the value proposition is about enhancing the customer experience. This is true of Trusted Advisors’ customers who are adopting the technology, as well as the customers of those companies adopting UCaaS. If you look at the ways that customers want to interact with the companies with which they do business, UCaaS brings new capabilities like SMS, video, email, and even certain types of social media which can be added to the equation. This cloud-based offering provides conferenc- ing for every employee connected to the system – which is not the case with traditional PBX. Virtual conference rooms also are available, and as the world recently has seen, such features are particularly important during times when remote work is especially desirable. Many offerings may connect to CRM and ERP applications in order to streamline customer service. The full feature list is generally available on both the laptop and the mobile device; however not all CRM/ERP systems are compatible with mobile use. “When you update your Over time, these capabilities typically move from platform, you’re raising differentiator status to table stakes. Those unable to the stakes of what your find the desired communications from one vendor will be likely to move down the road in favor of com- business can do.” panies that do provide those options. Parallel to that consideration, UCaaS generally supports the gathering of data and analytics so organi- zations can effectively measure, then analyze in a separate solution, interactions with customers and other constituents. Thus, the net value of UCaaS can be substantially higher than that of basic telephony, as delivered by a traditional Private Branch eXchange (PBX). Copyright © 2020 AVANT Communications, Inc. 13