CPaaS, UCaaS, or CCaaS - which is superior?

Business communications are changing in response to new ways of working and customer expectations.

Hybrid and remote work may be here to stay: an Ipsos global survey found 68% of respondents favouring hybrid work, and 25% preferring fully remote work over on-premise arrangements.¹ This increasing preference for out-of-office productivity will likely sustain the demand for better internal communication and collaboration tools.

Evolving customer expectations have also put a premium on customer service, and business leaders are taking note: 81% of business leaders in a Zendesk survey say customer experience and support will be growing priorities for 2023, and 80% of them plan to increase their customer service budgets this year.² To remain competitive, organisations will need to improve how they interact with customers, ideally by making communications as seamless as possible.

In response, organisations around the world are increasingly turning to cloud-based communications solutions. Three main service models have become popular in recent years: CPaaS, UCaas, and CCaaS. In this article, we’ll demystify these acronyms and show how CPaaS, in particular, can help you achieve more.

All three solutions make use of the cloud—although some can incorporate on-premise or hybrid configurations³—and follow a subscription-based model. They share certain features but address different needs.

UCaaS,⁴ or Unified Communications as a Service, brings together multiple enterprise tools for communicating and collaborating. This includes telephony, instant messaging, and audio/video/web conferencing. UCaaS primarily addresses communications within an organisation, with a heavy focus on features that let team members touch base and work together.

Companies looking to set up shop in new regions can tap on UCaaS to establish a seamless communications solution across regions without having to separately manage things like complying with local telecom regulations, or ensuring devices are compatible with country-specific power supplies.⁵

Retailers can also use this service model to make sure all departments are on the same page.⁶ Let’s say a customer visits one of your brick-and-mortar stores looking for a product they saw on your website. A unified communications solution can make it faster for in-store staff to pinpoint whether the item is available—something that would be cumbersome to do on fragmented, legacy systems.

CCaaS,⁷ which stands for Contact Center as a Service, has a different focus - it is designed to help companies communicate with customers. Think of it as a contact centre hosted on the cloud, instead of in an infrastructure-heavy on-premise facility.

CCaaS facilitates omnichannel interactions, which means you can meet your customers on their preferred platforms. It also supports automation tools like Interactive Voice Response systems⁸—prompts that ask callers to “press one for option X”—which drastically optimises contact centre operations.

Done well, CCaaS can improve interactions for both customers and employees: the former can enjoy a fast, feature-rich, self-service approach, and the latter gets to focus on cases that require a more hands-on approach.

CCaaS platforms like Amazon Connect, for instance, help organisations do this through effective case management.⁹ By smoothly integrating contact centre and case management products, the platform gives customer service representatives easy access to a centralised source of information—instead of having to look through separate spreadsheets, emails, and note files—allowing them to deliver quick, accurate updates to customers. Call or chatbots can also automate the entire process of checking on the status of pending issues and informing the customer.

Lastly, CPaaS,¹⁰ or Communications Platform as a Service, is a service model that lets companies add various real-time communication capabilities—such as messaging, video, and voice—into their own existing business applications. This eliminates the need to use separate communication apps for calls or messaging.

CPaaS uses APIs (application programming interfaces) to let users integrate features into their apps in a user-friendly way, without building their own backend infrastructures. Effective CPaaS service providers also work with trusted developers and partners to create custom apps for their clients.

A few functions CPaaS can help you with include automating reminders, scheduling, and messaging, beefing up mobile payments security through SMS two-factor authentication and optimising customer support resources by incorporating Interactive Voice Response systems—a feature shared with CCaaS.

As these services are cloud-based, CPaaS, UCaaS, or CCaaS providers take care of the infrastructure and its maintenance, thereby lessening the administrative and financial burden on your organisation. Being cloud-powered also means that these platforms are scalable, flexible, and secure.

A subscription model can also yield significant cost savings, allowing companies to forgo heavy upfront capital expenditures. Instead of allocating a hefty portion of your budget to set up, secure, and maintain your communications infrastructure, service providers will typically allow you to pay monthly, annually, or follow a regular payment schedule. CPaaS, for instance, is usually billed monthly with fixed per-message or per-minute fees or following a pay-per-call arrangement. With a low financial barrier to entry, you can get your business communications tools up and running in no time.

Between UCaaS and CCaaS,¹¹ the former supports communication across geographies better, whereas the latter wins in multi- and omnichannel communication. Additional benefits of CPaaS include easy customisation and faster deployment of apps and features, and the ability to pay only for the services you need.

If you’ve already invested in CPaaS as your service model of choice, you’ve made the right decision.¹² Here’s why.

CPaaS addresses a wide range of internal and external communication needs. It integrates with UCaaS and CCaaS solutions, and popular customer relationship management tools.

Companies handling large volumes of customer calls and interactions across many channels can benefit from a CCaaS solution, but CPaaS allows them to cover more ground by enabling the automated delivery of outbound notifications, smart call routing, AI-powered chatbots, and automated customer authentication processes.

On the other hand, organisations using UCaaS to power their internal communications can tap CPaaS to build a communications workflow between their contact centres and their employees who are using the UCaaS platform.

CPaaS is also easily customisable and scalable, allowing users to build or add features as needed, without paying for unnecessary functions. And because it saves you from having to make or buy new apps or think about the backend IT infrastructure of adding features to existing ones, your organisation gets to focus on improving existing apps and systems. Capable service providers even offer perks such as developer support and analytics, allowing you to do even more with CPaaS.

CPaaS from Singtel gives you the broadest feature set that this service model can offer. It enables mobile interactive voice response, mobile unified communications, Microsoft Teams UC Connector, modern contact centre solutions, APIs for SMS and voice, an easy way to comply with the Personal Data Protection Act covering do-not-call registry lists,¹³ and a secure, mobile-first platform called Singtel MultiLine.

Deploying CPaaS can help improve both customer and employee experience for a range of organisations, including those with a hybrid workforce, contact centres, financial and educational institutions, as well as banks, logistics companies, retailers, and e-commerce platforms.

For more insight into how your organisation can take full advantage of CPaaS from Singtel, reach out to us today. You can also visit our website to learn more about how our other services can help your business flourish in a digital world.

References:

1. World Economic Forum, Hybrid working: Why there’s a widening gap between leaders and employees, 2022.

2. Zendesk, CX TRENDS 2023, 2023.

3. World Wide Technology, Cloud vs. On-Premise Contact Center: What is the Right Option?, 2020.

4. Gartner, Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), n.d.

5. Ring Central, 3 use cases for a global UCaaS solution, 2023.

6. Acefone, Unified Communication in The Retail Market: Case Studies, 2021.

7. Gartner, Contact Center as a Service Reviews and Ratings, n.d.

8. Forbes Advisor, What is IVR (Interactive Voice Response) & How Does it Work?, 2023.

9. CX Today, CCaaS: Why Effective Case Management is Critical to Delivering Top Customer Service, 2022.

10. TechTarget, communications platform as a service (CPaaS), 2021.

11. TechTarget, UCaaS vs. CCaaS vs. CPaaS: What's the difference?, 2022.

12. Forbes, The Evolution of Enterprise Communications: Understanding How CPaaS, UCaaS And CCaaS Work Together to Meet Your Business’ Communications Needs, 2021.

13. Personal Data Protection Commission, PDPA Overview, 2022.