2023 National Summit: Unlock Opportunities by Integrating UCaaS, CPaaS, & Microsoft Teams

Get to know these technology phrases/categories/solutions, and how they work/integrate together – Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS); Communications Platforms as a Service (CPaaS); Twilio; Microsoft Teams (MS Teams/Teams); Infobip; Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and so much more. You can provide the comprehensive Cloud communication and productivity tools organizations need to solve their business challenges and increase their performance by improving the way they work with their customers and employees. You can help your clients fully build out or enhance their communications stack (they may need components or a whole new approach) while offering enhanced functionality, flexibility, reliability, and overall long-term cost savings (through retention, productivity, etc.).

Ben Edwards, Director, Sales Engineer – West; and Andrew Rustad, Director, Sales Engineer – East shared their thoughts and discussed the solutions and opportunities available with Ty Kostan, Avaya Partner Exp. Technical Leader; Mario DeRiggi, Fusion Connect Chief Revenue Officer; Suzanne Schumacher, Zultys Area Sales Director; and Michael Quince, 8×8 VP of Channel Sales.

“Integration is an opportunity,” begins Ben, “for us to help our customers. Think about all those messages; the campaigns; MS Teams – it’s everywhere, I spend 50% of my day talking about (Teams); Salesforce; (and) chatbots…companies have got to integrate and bring in digital. The stats tell the story of what that means to the customer experience, how people will be more sticky, and more interested as we help our customers do this.”

The Impact of Adopting/Integrating These Solutions

“We want to talk to you about what’s happening in the marketplace,” continues Mike. “CPaaS, UCaaS, MS Teams…these are trends that are just expanding, continuing to grow, and continuing to move. What we’re seeing is (Partners) are selling a UC solution, a CC solution, selling CCaaS; you’re going to then bring on CPaaS with that. Integrating with UC, CC (or Microsoft Teams you can bring on solution) opportunities that enhance what they have today. It’s not about selling something net new, it’s finding the problem, and then solving the problem that they have. (With CPaas) you don’t need to get rid of what they have today, you can expand and continue on.”

Example: A car company reduced call volume by 80%, with a simple CPaaS deployment

“CX (Customer Experience) and EX (Employee Experience) are equally important,” states Michael, “if the experience is not as good, guess where your employees go, they look for other jobs (and) they look for other places to work. Integrating all these technologies into a single platform solves (the) problem around EX and CX, and the technology is evolving fast. All this is great, but if you can’t provide the analytics, the reporting, and the integrations into applications like MS Teams, then we haven’t done a good enough job.”

“The opportunity around teams is tremendous,” says Mario, “a top three priority this year (is) voice-activated seats. Microsoft is pushing hard to go out and get voice-activated seats. They know who their customers are, teams comes with every (Microsoft) 365 customer, if you are not speaking to your customers about Teams and Teams integrations, I promise you, somebody else is, because Microsoft is putting a tremendous amount of not only resources but funding as well. You have to be speaking to them.”

“Some customers are holding onto on-premises (solutions),” adds Suzanne, “they have some features they just don’t want to give up on. They’re afraid to move to the Cloud because they don’t want to have the legacy features that they’ve been relying on, and suddenly can’t have those on the Cloud product. We started as a premise product and evolved into a Cloud product, so we have a lot of those legacy features still. With customers knowing they can still have those features, we’re finding they’re a lot more willing to move to the Cloud.”

“This is about having deeper conversations with the customers you’re talking to,” concludes Andy. “About the way they communicate internally, employee to employee, externally, business to client, and most importantly, how does the (end-using customer) want to communicate with (the business). We can help you with that conversation and a better understanding of the opportunity out there.”

The discussion included many examples and deep dives into the kinds of features your customers want, and the results they can achieve. Start learning more about UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, and integrated solutions, including MS Teams, that you can offer your clientele right now. For the full discussion, watch the session recording today!