Choosing the Right UCaaS Provider: Key Factors to Consider

In today’s business markets, it’s all about speed. Speed in adopting new trends, speed in responding to new leads, and even speed in internal communications across multiple channels. Companies of all sizes and industries know this—and with UCaaS helping businesses make decisions 2.6 times faster, your clients are even more likely to see value in UCaaS options. In fact, mainstream adoption is well underway, with the UCaaS market growing at 25.3% CAGR through 2027.

But to make the most of this trend, your reselling business needs to be ready to offer the right UCaaS solution to each of your clients. That starts with understanding why it’s so beneficial for your clients and why, in turn, offering UCaaS is so beneficial for you. Armed with that knowledge, you can then begin determining what factors matter most to you in a UCaaS provider and how you can form a UCaaS partnership that strengthens your business for years to come.

Today’s Businesses Need UCaaS for Internal and Client-Facing Operations

Before you introduce any product or collection of products into your business catalog, you need to understand your target market’s perspective. What are their pain points with other classes of communication tools, and what benefits are they most excited about accessing? 

Related: How the Right UCaaS Phone System Provider Can Impact Your Clients

The answers to these questions will be radically different for different businesses. After all, the communication demands of third-party benefits administrators that need to comply with HIPAA will be very different than the communication needs of a pest control service with technicians out in the field. However, there are some core benefits that are reaching business-critical levels for almost every business:

• UCaaS has lower implementation and hardware costs. UCaaS tools are in the cloud. That means lean businesses won’t need to worry about servers and hardware. A neatly packaged solution also has fewer license and integration costs at the start.
• It’s built for remote and hybrid work. Hybrid work trends are in flux, but they will never disappear. Businesses need tools to communicate instantly with employees in the office, at home, on the road or in other offices. They also need to be able to communicate with contractors, vendors, and customers. UCaaS empowers instantaneous communication across multiple channels without sacrificing security or productivity. In fact, it improves them. 
• UCaaS improves data security. UCaaS can secure communications by keeping them all within the same cloud-based ecosystem. The software itself (especially at the enterprise level) has more barriers against penetration, and a robust collection of tools means employees are less likely to speak through unsecured channels like apps or third-party tools. Managed UCaaS is even more tempting to businesses that don’t have a full cybersecurity team on staff.
• It’s flexible. Businesses need software that allows for a great deal of flexibility and scalability—without a lot of overhead. They might be growing their business, or they might have seasonal ups and downs with temp positions. Some months may see an increase in contractors, but 2024 might start with downsizing. UCaaS licenses make scalability simple—which is a big advantage when a business is considering changing any significant part of how they do business.

If one or all of these reasons sound like they resonate with your clients, then you know adding UCaaS to your services catalog can be a big benefit to their success while being a revenue-rich venture for your own business. It’s just a matter of finding the right UCaaS provider who can help you provide these benefits.

How Resellers Benefit From Offering UCaaS Solutions to Their Clients

Of course, revenue by itself isn’t enough to make something a good fit for your business. Prioritizing things that bring in a profit and that strengthen your relationships with your clients is essential. Done properly, integrating UCaaS into your offerings can do both. First, you become a more comprehensive services provider. When you become the sole provider for more and more of your clients’ IT and tech needs, they become more reliant on your business for their communication needs, and you can be more certain of your retention forecasts. 

With the right provider, offering UCaaS is also simple. The provider handles the hosting, technical support, and solutions, allowing you to manage the relationship, pricing, and marketing. We’ll discuss this in more detail later, but looking for UCaaS providers that give you easy invoicing tools and adopt a hands-off approach to product package requirements will go a long way in ensuring that simplicity.

Finally, offering UCaaS establishes your authority in your niche. Your clients are already asking about UCaaS, and when you proactively provide the answers and solutions, they feel more confident either choosing you or staying with you. Staying up-to-date on business communication trends, different SaaS options in the marketplace, and the technical pros and cons of different strategies makes you a trusted partner—not just a vendor—for your book of business.

How to Choose the Right UCaaS Provider: 6 Factors to Consider

Once you’ve seen the value UCaaS provides for both your clients’ businesses and your own business, it’s time to find a UCaaS provider that fits your plan. There are many different providers in the market, but, depending on which of the above benefits matter most, some UCaaS options will offer more features than others. Use this list of distinguishing factors as you start to consider different providers. Make sure they can address each element and any other concerns on your mind.

#1: Customizable Plans That Fit You and Your Clients

Some UCaaS providers only offer restrictive plan solutions, with built-in pricing requirements and no flexibility. But this can be a hindrance to your business. You must be able to offer unique products that fit your target market—customizable services that can meet the needs of providers and pest control companies with flexible pricing options. 

Related: Finding Your Perfect Match: Evaluating UCaaS Providers for Optimized Business Communication

Look for a UCaaS provider that lets you decide the license minimums for different packages, the implementation and monthly prices that fit your business, and even the discounts you offer. Depending on how you do business, you might offer starting discounts, volume discounts, or retention discounts. The key here is that your UCaaS provider is a partner but that you retain control over business and product decisions.

#2: Integrations for Virtually Every Industry

Make sure your prospective UCaaS partner offers robust software with the capabilities your clients are likely to value. Along with standard Private Branch Exchange (PBX) and Telco portals with features and controls, look for:

• Voice APIs so you and/or your clients can customize the UCaaS portal to offer unique, programmatic options, such as connecting with legacy tools and databases, feeding call data into your preferred dashboards and reports, and more.
• Integrations to connect the PBX with any of the hundreds of CRMs used by different businesses—this ensures you can offer your clients a solution that seamlessly fits into their existing tech stack. The more CRM integrations a service provider credibly offers, the wider your net of prospective clients can be.

Integrations and APIs mean your UCaaS provider won’t lock you into a specific industry or a market that only uses a limited set of tools.

#3: Comprehensive Support You Can Rely On

Choose a UCaaS provider that gives you both a high level of uptime and the tools to monitor uptime and performance. Providers that have a 99.99%+ uptime percentage are reliable and won’t frustrate your clients with outages or interruptions. Infrastructural support and monitoring tools also give you peace of mind and let you stay on top of all the technical aspects of managing client relationships. 

Also, you’ll want a provider that actively handles the support functions. This includes operational support, application system support, and business support. This frees up your schedule to grow your business.

#4: Network Redundancy That Your Clients Can Rely On

A 99.99%+ uptime isn’t just good for your business—it’s essential for your clients. The more a UCaaS provider offers in order to ensure high uptime, the better. Network redundancy is the practice of creating or using multiple different paths that can each route voice and data traffic—if one path fails, the tools are still functional. This cuts down the risk of interruption due to cyberattacks, storms, or even just failed equipment. 

#5: Scalability That Helps Everyone Thrive With Fewer Growing Pains

Over time, your clients’ businesses will change in size and scope. Offering responsive software options with more or fewer licenses, easy transitions to different packages, and advice about what to do at different stages of growth makes you a valuable business partner. Look for providers that both (i) don’t get in the way of your ability to offer flexibility and (ii) make the logistics of scaling accounts up or down simple.

#6: Billing Tools That Assist Your Operations

Telephony billing gets incredibly complex. There are a multitude of different local, state, and federal taxes that you and your clients will be obligated to pay, even for services that are in lieu of traditional phone networks. The ideal UCaaS provider will equip you with a billing tool that lets you calculate anticipated taxes and clearly communicate those line item charges to customers. Not only does this make compliance easier for everyone, but it helps you maintain your client relationships by eliminating the risk of sudden bills, overcharges, or billing miscommunications.

Build Your Business with the Right UCaaS Partner

If you’ve decided that UCaaS makes sense for your business, don’t wait to start offering it to your clients. Adding it to your array of service options makes your business ready for 2024 goal-setting and business transformation projects. It also sets the foundation for solid growth in the years to come. At SkySwitch, we offer all the benefits listed above and more. From support, monitoring tools, and billing portals for your own use to simple agreements that don’t interfere with how you want to run your business, our UCaaS services are built for resellers who are actively growing their businesses. Schedule a demo today for behind-the-scenes insights into offering UCaaS.