Why a Telephony-Centric Approach Is Leaving Companies Behind in the AI Era
Is it time to hang up on CCaaS?
The emergence of the practice of Unified Interaction Management (UIM)—combining human and AI customer interactions throughout all forms of digital and voice—is prompting leaders at many companies to rethink their long-standing reliance on legacy CCaaS vendors.
What is CCaaS?
Quick history: In the early 2000s, the first Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) companies disrupted the industry by introducing the idea of hosting call center software in the cloud. Great idea. Still is.
But in the digital-first, AI-enabled world that will define our industry from 2025 to 2030 and beyond, CCaaS is now being categorized academically as “necessary but insufficient.” As more and more companies are evolving to a ChannelLess® environment, they are recognizing the distinction between CCaaS, which is a pipeline–a routing and queuing system for incoming phone calls and chats–and UIM, which is a practice.
UIM vs. CCaaS: What’s The Difference?
UIM is a different way of looking at how to create the right interaction for the right customer at the right time. It’s a system of understanding what each customer needs, and executing an action to generate the greatest value for both the customer and the company—interaction after interaction, month after month.
UIM starts with the same utility as CCaaS, but enables transitions between all forms of communication and collaboration within a single interaction. A ChannelLess® platform means no matter where the interaction starts, it can seamlessly flow between AI and human, between digital and voice. That’s very different from the rigid call center technology companies have been using for years.
Three Ways UIM is Disrupting CCaaS
As part of my job at Glia, I visit some of our clients throughout the year to conduct interactive workshops about the practice of Unified Interaction Management–and based on their reactions and experiences–we’ve been observing 3 major disruptions to the CCaaS-dominated world of the past 2 decades.
See if any of these appeal to you:
Disruption 1: UIM Simplifies Contact Center Management.
As call centers morphed into contact centers, they became increasingly more complex. Not only many new channels (and teams) to manage, but at least as many new outside companies to depend on (and negotiate with!) as well.
Vendor Proliferation Syndrome may not be a psychologically diagnosable condition, but it’s a real thing. In a recent industry survey, Glia discovered that 69% of leaders and executives feel their current contact center technology is no longer even meeting their expectations, let alone setting them up for success in the second half of this decade. And 93% say they are open to evaluating new technology solutions to match the demands of today’s more empowered customers.
For those companies that are evolving to UIM, one joyous benefit is that they are now able to consolidate the number of vendors they need to rely on. By having all interactions (phone, chat, voice, AI-assisted) unified into a single platform, it creates a newfound simplicity in execution, measurement and management that makes going back to the old CCaaS model seem hectic and unnecessarily complex. Plus, the benefits of unified reporting and analysis makes it easter than ever to optimize for efficiency. This is a peaceful disruption that many executives are both excited and relieved to experience.
Disruption 2: UIM Ends the Frustration of Isolated Interactions.
It was inevitable that as companies added new digital channels over time, each would be managed independently as they emerged-–but without a cohesive plan. Before the advent of UIM, that was the only way to manage. But there’s a cost to the traditional CCaaS-led channel strategy.
Customers who are forced to switch between channels just to solve a single problem experienced a degree of high-effort that left them 50% less loyal, even after just one bad interaction. And for companies that have been operating with different digital and phone frontline teams and analyzing their metrics separately, that’s created inadvertent negatives like a 50% reduction in efficiency and 25% lower revenue conversion.
However, for organizations that are now working in a unified environment, they are able to take greater control over all interactions. And by enabling AI to either automate or augment every interaction, the new goal has become to consistently create the most efficient operation AND the best experience for each customer.
- Some needs can be immediately handled by a virtual assistant.
- Some require a messaging interaction.
- Others require a human conversation.
By managing each interaction more holistically based on that customer’s need (instead of by which channel they chose) there is no more disconnect, no more isolation in execution and management. The customer gets exactly what they need in the fastest and most effortless way–every time they contact you. This is a disruption to the customer experience that is now long overdue.
Disruption 3: UIM Makes it Easier for Agents to Help Customers.
You’ve heard it a million times, but it’s never been less true: Your frontline employees, the people who work directly with customers, are the most important people at your company. But here’s one of the ironies of living in the AI Era: As we analyze billions of customer interactions, at the best companies, bots aren’t replacing humans. They’re just making their lives a whole lot easier and more engaging.
As companies get better at the practice of UIM, they have a better understanding of which kinds of customer issues can be handled by a bot. As a result, the endless string of routine, quotidian interactions don’t have to be handled by a person any more (a person who, by the way. eventually gets bored and burned out).
Freed up from handling routine inquiries, reps can offer more personalized service. By the time an agent enters an interaction (whether via messaging or voice) they can already know who that customer is, and have a pretty good idea about what it takes to provide a great experience. That creates a completely different dynamic for frontline employees compared to the old “How may I help you?” approach in CCaaS.
And now that AI can handle so many of the secondary details (like when Agents have to simultaneously take notes while also “pretending” to give the customer their full attention), your frontline people can be more human. The practice of Responsible AI and the concept of AI For All means 100% of interactions can be either automated or augmented by AI assistance.
In UIM, your people are the chefs, while AI is the prep cook who takes care of the chopping and dicing to set them up for success. This is a disruption that is changing the employee experience, as well as the nature of who companies can attract for frontline positions–and how long they can keep them.
Lead The Way Forward With UIM
Two decades ago as companies signed their first-ever contracts with various CCaaS suppliers, it was a smart move. And some of those vendor companies are still around, doing their best to remain viable in a disruptive world. But as you start to see the differences between the pipeline of CCaaS and the practice of UIM–and the difference between the companies who created those technologies–it becomes clear to the point of obviousness which direction your company needs to pursue in 2025 in order to remain competitive going forward.
Want to see the difference for yourself? Book a UIM demo now.
