UC/UCaaS - Customer Service Challenges for Providers

UC/UCaaS, the industry

UC (Unified Communications) is the integration of an array of communication services ranging from IP telephony, video conferencing, instant messaging, email, presence, call control, voicemail, fax, SMS, business applications, etc. in an enterprise setting. UC is a set of interoperable products and services aiming to result in greater collaboration and increased employee productivity. While UC can be an on-premise solution, cloud based delivery models known as UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service), and hybrid models also exist and are evolving.

Cloud based and hybrid delivery models also result in significant cost savings in terms of power savings, streamlined networking, reduced real estate, employee mobility, and decrease in IT and Operational capital expenditure for enterprises. Some providers also bundle LAN and WLAN services as part of their UCaaS offering. The UC/UCaaS industry is in an early stage market and is experiencing rapid growth in terms of innovation and delivery/pricing models.

UCaaS Vs. conventional services in terms of end users

While UC/UCaaS usher the opportunities of cloud computing and cloud based collaboration to enterprises (in addition to the benefits of UCaaS), the model also comes with challenges for both the UCaaS providers and the enterprises that use it. Compared to conventional telephony or collaboration service providers, UCaaS providers touch and serve a larger group of end users. For example, in conventional telephony service if a provider has 50,000 customers, they just have 50,000 users to interact with. Each customer will have an IT administrator or facilities manager that deals with the service provider. In UCaaS model, 50,000 customers translate into 50,000 customers and at least as many as the number of employees of each of those customers.

UC tries to empower the users with aggregation of collaboration tools and provides great deal of flexibility. With the flexibility and the availability of services in the offering, comes the need of customization and changes for individual users. In other words, UC provider becomes an extended part of the customer organization's operational fulfillment and becomes key driver for increased productivity. Customers of certain verticals such as transcription services, law firms and accounting firms have greater need for constant changes to their end devices and features due to the nature of their business (account codes and communication services chargeable to their customers).

UCaaS Administration Challenges

A Gartner’s 2010 report on Critical Capabilities for Unified Communications makes a point on the significance of UC providers to make this control and administration of UCaaS services handy for the end users. Self-provisioning and administration from user/subscriber level become critical with sizable organizations (50 or more users). Gartner report also signifies the need for batch upload and offload of subscriber data to and from UCaaS directories as part of migration from current solutions to UCaaS solution.

If the need for subscriber level administration, feature management and support are not part of the UCaaS provider’s offerings, it can result in overhead for customer’s IT administrators as well as the UCaaS provider’s customer service efforts. If all the subscriber needs are funneled through the customer’s IT administrators, it’s not only an overhead for them (that they don’t deal with conventional services); it also leads to slow response times for subscriber change requests. Innovation in UCaaS industry also indicates training and learning challenges for the subscribers on a constant basis. After all, the premise of UCaas or UC is about unifying communications and eliminating latencies in business processes and operations. These challenges if left unaddressed in a strategic manner as part of the UCaaS offering can create additional customer service overhead for the provider and the customer satisfaction will eventually suffer.

Empower the end users with Subscriber Self-Help Portal

UCaaS providers need to adapt a self-help subscriber portal initiative as part of their offering, targeting not just customer administrators, but all the subscribers of the service (employees of the customer using the service) to address these challenges. The portal will have to encompass all the features of the provider’s UCaaS offering.

Some critical use cases that the self-help portal in UCaaS environment need to address at a minimum:

Global features:
• Subscriber level access and self-management of features
• Single sign-on
• Platform based (API) support for larger enterprises that need bulk request processing
• Knowledge base
• Notifications
• Maintenance alerts
• Pro-active device health patterns
• E911 management
• Device management

Subscriber level:
• Subscriber level access and self-management of features
• Self-provisioning of new devices, services
• Support or Trouble Tickets
• Feature management, MAC (Move, Add, Change)
• Knowledge base

Customer Administrator level:
• Call records,Usage
• Billing, Payments
• Subscriber management
• Secretarial features (requests on behalf of other subscribers)

Need for Flexible Design and Subscriber Adoption Strategy

The interoperable components and/or services that power the UCaaS offering will have their own interface, and as part of the unified offering, it’s a challenge for the UCaaS provider to build a self-help solution that satisfies the individual needs of the subscribers. However, UCaaS providers need to put the power of control and administration in the hands of the customers and subscribers to enhance the experience of UCaaS. A well designed custom self-help subscriber portal that’s both part of and encompasses the UC/UCaaS offering coupled with the right subscriber adoption strategy will significantly increase customer experience and reduce customer service overhead for UC/UCaaS providers.

Let us help you

To find out more about how TechO2 can help your UC/UCaaS offering with custom self-help subscriber portal that increases your customer’s satisfaction, please contact us.