The smart business move: 8 reasons why companies are moving to an integrated UC + CC platform

The obvious benefits of it being easy for agents to connect with experts in real time or having one bill for your communication solutions are not the only advantages of a unified platform. Companies identified the following values, which, when combined, have the power to transform a business into a streamlined powerhouse.

1. Enable agents and supervisors to provide customer feedback for sales and marketing programs

With all of your teams working on one platform inside and outside of the contact center, getting direct customer insights to your sales and marketing teams can be a much more turnkey process. Many UC + CC providers include CRM integration, which can enable a more complete customer view.

Germany-based consulting firm Living Hausexperiencedthe benefits of shared customer data firsthand after successfully integrating Zoom Contact Center into their CRM process. This has enabled them to track leads and address customer needs more accurately. The result is a personalized experience that grows and builds loyalty and confidence in the Living Haus brand. 

2. Allow conversations between frontline and back-office personnel over the same app

Traditionally, contact centers have operated separately from the rest of the organization, leading to a fragmented customer experience. By combining UC + CC along with the power of AI to provide a Total Experience for customers, agents can connect with experts outside the contact center to resolve customer queries as a team. 

Take one of our customers, Topaz Services, for example. Topaz is an outsourced “Hotel Contact Center” and needs easy access to the hotels they represent to resolve customer queries and issues quickly. Previously, Topaz relied on email as a primary communication tool, which made it virtually impossible to get any kind of response while live on a call. With Zoom Team Chat, Topaz agents can connect instantaneously with hotel staff to answer questions like “Is the hotel pool still under construction?”. Agents can respond accurately to a guest’s questions on the spot, significantly reducing handle times.

3. Facilitate agents and supervisors to share product development feedback

On one shared platform, contact center employees can easily provide customer insights to the product development team to help improve their solutions, which increases the odds of customers remaining loyal and satisfied. A good AI-powered Quality Management tool can be used to gather these insights faster than before. Distribution of information can be made easier with custom or out-of-the-box APIs that can be integrated with your UC + CC platform and made accessible to the right teams.

Insurance service provider Amynta Group*’s use of Zoom Quality Management shows how deeper insights can be pulled across interactions by filtering specific keywords and phrases. For example, if they search for a particular term, such as “transmission,” they can see how often it appears in conversations during a selected time frame. They can then isolate just those interactions and get valuable AI-generated insight into the recurring issues with the interactions that include that keyword. 

*Amynta joined us at Zoomtopia 2024, where Tim Beamer, director of automotive warranty claims, shared his experience with Zoom.

4. Bring collaboration tools to the contact center

When the entire organization uses one platform for employee and customer communications, collaboration and efficiency simply become second nature. 

InflectionCX, a contact center BPO, has seen jaw-dropping improvements in efficiencies in customer service and internal processes using Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Workplace together. Not only have they dramatically reduced their call time by 3 minutes and after-call work by 3.5 minutes, but they’ve also seen drastic changes in how they train and collaborate as a team. 

Chris Crosby, founder and CEO, has migrated all of InflectionCX’s contact center training materials to Zoom Docs, centralizing knowledge management and sharing. This makes it easier to onboard new agents and significantly reduces their ramp-up time. The same training materials are fed into Zoom Virtual Agent, providing consistency in customer and agent experience. Plus, all agents are connected via Zoom Team Chat and Zoom Mail. Because they are all on one platform, they can solve problems and get questions answered quickly without having to toggle between multiple applications and screens.

5. Consolidate analytics with common interfaces and cross-platform metrics

Deep analytics are great for contact centers, but what if they could help the rest of your organization? Better still, what if you could pull data from other parts of the organization with ease? A key piece of sales data from the customer’s first purchase could provide that missing link to an exceptional customer experience. Plus, getting a full picture of the entire customer journey across technologies can reveal valuable insights into the contact center and other parts of your business for the management and executive team. 

For Topaz Services, having Zoom Contact Center right in the Zoom Workplace app makes it easy to get visibility into all office, toll-free, and shared lines. This enables the management team to monitor all customer communications regardless of who is handling the call.

6. Support the use of video or screen-sharing during customer calls

Sometimes it can be difficult to explain a complex issue over the phone. Perhaps a customer has a busted pipe they are trying to fix with guidance from a tech support agent. Or maybe it’s a personal health issue that a doctor needs to be able to see to diagnose. 

Having the ability to move easily from phone or chat to a video call can make all the difference in a customer’s experience. As shown above, the data in Metrigy’s research clearly shows that it’s a key value-add for a combined UC+CC approach, with 39% appreciating the value of video and screen-sharing during customer calls.

Businesses can see tangible results too when they add video calls as an option in customer interactions. AVI-SPL, a global digital enablement solutions provider for cloud communications and audiovisual technology, found that moving to video-enabled calls with Zoom Contact Center reduced diagnosis resolution time by 10%.

7. Pull experts into customer interactions

Effective service is all about speed. If your customers are waiting to be served, or worse, having to repeat themselves over and over to multiple agents, your customer service is failing. A unified communications and contact center platform can make it easy for agents to get customers to the right subject matter expert who can effectively respond to their queries  — the first time. Add AI to the mix and the repetitive ‘Doom Loop’ can be a thing of the past thanks to AI-driven call summaries and context that can be passed to each employee the customer touches. 

One of Zoom’s customers, Vensure, discovered that the faster they can route calls to the right people, the higher the likelihood of single-call resolution. Now that every Vensure employee uses Zoom Phone, anyone can easily be added to a client call that comes in via Zoom Contact Center. This means clients can get quick access to subject matter experts across the company who can answer their questions and resolve their issues first-hand. The result: shorter calls and fewer return callers.

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