Key UCaaS Features of the Best Solutions for Your Business
The popularity of Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) continues to rise rapidly, with an expected annual market growth of more than 15% every year through at least 2031. As a result, especially for businesses looking to establish themselves as credible communications software resellers, knowing which UCaaS key features to look for can help distinguish you from competitors who might sell lower-level solutions when jumping onto the same trend.
A rapidly growing market means more software platform providers are looking at taking advantage of rising revenue opportunities. The right features are the key to finding a solution you can trust and that satisfies your clients. In return, you can avoid relying on questionable platforms that may not hold their promise in the long term.
To really thrive as a UCaaS reseller, you need to go beyond the basic features. Most platform vendors you can partner with will offer options like business SMS, SIP Trunking, and video conferencing. Consider these the foundation of the platform you’re looking for. More advanced features create the structure on which your clients’ future communications will be built, and your business’s reputation will grow.
For a comprehensive overview, a top UCaaS provider comparison can be invaluable in evaluating different offerings.
In this guide, we’ll discuss both core and advanced features, with a heavier focus on the latter, that can help you partner with a UCaaS vendor your clients will love.
Introduction to UCaaS
Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) is revolutionizing the way businesses handle their communication needs. By integrating multiple communication tools and services into a single, cloud-based platform, UCaaS solutions offer a seamless and efficient way to manage business communications. Whether it’s voice, video, messaging, or conferencing, UCaaS provides a comprehensive suite of communication and collaboration tools accessible from any device with an internet connection. This not only streamlines communication processes but also reduces costs and enhances collaboration across teams, regardless of their physical location.
What is UCaaS?
UCaaS is a cloud-based communication platform that integrates voice, video, messaging, and collaboration tools into a unified system. Delivered over the Internet, UCaaS solutions allow businesses to access their communication tools from anywhere, at any time. This flexibility and scalability make UCaaS an ideal solution for businesses looking to grow and adapt to changing communication needs. By consolidating various communication channels into a single platform, UCaaS solutions simplify the management of business communications and provide a more cohesive and efficient communication experience.
The Core UCaaS Features for Your Reselling Business
When looking for UCaaS solutions most suitable for your business needs, these central features should be the first thing you consider:
SIP Trunking and voice API – routing business phone lines and other means of communications through the internet
Video conferencing – enabling a more in-the-moment and flexible connection, especially for hybrid and remote teams
Business SMS to leverage one of the most successful rising marketing and business communications channels
Call forwarding as a feature that provides flexibility and enhanced functionality for businesses
Call center and contact center as a service (CCaaS) capabilities to route inbound calls to relevant agents and recipients
Call routing to enhance customer interactions and improve communication within unified communication and contact center solutions
These features make up the core of the value equation. No vendor can truly call itself a UCaaS solution if its unified communications solutions don’t actually cover the most common channels businesses need to communicate. For any vendor you evaluate as a potential partner, these core UCaaS features are non-negotiable.
Naturally, the quality of these features also matters. For example, ensure that video calls can be conducted with high audio and video quality and with minimal disruptions. The need for quality uninterrupted communication is why the best solutions advertise their uptime as a crucial point of consideration.
To remain competitive and grow a base of loyal customers, it’s essential to go beyond these basic UCaaS features, prioritizing more advanced benefits and capabilities that can ultimately set your reselling business apart. Take a look at the following nine advanced features that can make all the difference when offering your clients valuable and customizable solutions.
1. Ease of Onboarding
For resellers, onboarding becomes a hugely critical proposition and one of the most important UCaaS features in business communication. First impressions make a difference, and for your clients, those first impressions about the service you sell them will set the bar for how they familiarize themselves with new ways of communicating. Communication services like UCaaS integrate multiple forms of communication, such as voice, video conferencing, and messaging, offering flexibility and scalability.
Related: How to Scale a Reseller Business with Flexible UCaaS Solutions
The best UCaaS solutions are both user-friendly and intuitive. They ease any user into the experience, resulting in minimal possible disruption and avoiding the need for extensive onboarding training. A unified interface that incorporates all core channels and activities your clients look for can help in that process.
At the same time, at least some onboarding will be necessary to move clients onto the software. UCaaS platforms that offer pre-built training courses, extensive and helpful knowledgebases, and other features designed to ease the transition can set themselves apart for any reseller looking to simplify that process with their customers.
2. Enhanced Scalability
Good tech solutions solve a company’s current needs and pain points. Great communication solutions evolve as the company evolves, continuing to solve emerging needs to remain a core piece of the productivity puzzle. Your clients will grow during their relationship with you as well, which makes focusing on UCaaS features designed to accommodate and enhance that growth so important.
Scalability, of course, can come in many shapes and sizes. Just some of the variables to look for include:
How easily can your clients add and remove users?
Can the UCaaS solution integrate with other technology?
How does pricing change as the need for UCaaS features, like a virtual call center, continues to expand?
Do increasing data and file sizes impact the storage capabilities of the platform?
As they’re looking towards external technology partners for their communications needs, your clients may or may not think ahead to these types of considerations. To improve the trust of your brand, it’s beneficial to put the onus on yourself, the reseller, to work with a platform designed to accommodate and solve future needs even their clients aren’t aware of.
3. Advanced Mobility and Collaboration Tools for Distributed Clients
The move to remote and hybrid work has been both rapid and consistent. Studies estimate that at least 40% of the U.S. workforce works remotely at least part of the time, changing the communications needs of the organizations employing them compared to even a few years ago.
Gone are the days of a wired desk phone being the only means of contact. Instead, modern workforces use their own devices, need to connect to the business comms network from anywhere, and need to be able to seamlessly transfer their calls from one device to the other.
Look for UCaaS software that accommodates these increasingly distributed workforce needs. Your clients will look for a unified communications platform that allows remote users to join calls and meetings regardless of their location or device. The more integrated the system can make non-centralized communications for those businesses, the broader your market for selling it will become.
4. Branding and Tech Customizability
As a UCaaS platform reseller, it’s important to brand your offerings to build trust and market visibility. Look for white-label UCaaS solutions that offer customization in branding and services to become an ideal partner for your business, leading to major potential advantages through unified communication.
In addition to placing your company brand on the platform, true software customization allows your clients to tie the platform into their existing tech and communications infrastructure, not the other way around.
Take the above-mentioned move to distributed work as an example. Features like cloud-based data sharing and video conferencing become essential for businesses moving in that direction. But for organizations still relying on a central office structure, high-tech on-premise devices may still matter. A solution that can accommodate both and adjust based on individual needs can become a win/win for you and your clients.
5. Client-Specific Billing Solutions
Some communications platforms are designed specifically for single end-users. They have a central billing structure, designed to streamline the process for both their customers and their own backend. But when you’re looking to resell the same solution to multiple clients, this inflexible structure can become problematic.
A thorough UCaaS providers comparison can help you identify the best solutions tailored to your specific business needs.
Start with a simple quoting and billing tool that creates quick quotes for clients, directly integrated into the products offered within the suite. This customizes the process for each client, making it easier for you to build and optimize your revenue stream.
Of course, streamlining your billing on the backend is important. Look for a partner who offers billing services training to ease the process for you and your clients.
6. Security and Technology Compliance for UCaaS Solutions
For businesses, data security is an increasingly crucial topic. With the rise of cloud-based communication services like UCaaS, which integrate multiple forms of communication such as voice, video conferencing, and messaging, the average cost of a cybersecurity breach shooting upwards of $4 million in 2022 makes data security a business priority essential to survival.
Naturally, UCaaS systems play a core role in that process. They manage most, if not all, customer contact and demographic data. Ensure that the system you choose can help your clients protect their data at all times, both for their sake and your business’s.
Even beyond basic cybersecurity, assured compliance is another core UCaaS feature. Standards like HIPAA for healthcare and FERPA for educational institutions can be complex for your data management practice. Work with a UCaaS provider who can help to ensure that compliance becomes a core selling point for attracting clients in those industries.
7. Third-Party Integrations
No matter how comprehensive your UCaaS system might be, it still won’t be the only piece of technology your clients use. That makes it vital for the platform to integrate with other software solutions working toward the same business goals.
When evaluating top UCaaS providers, it’s important to consider how well they integrate with other essential business tools. For example, the solution you sell could integrate with your clients’ CRM, project management tools, workflow solutions, and internal communications tools. The easier it is for your UCaaS system to integrate with these existing solutions, the more natural and obvious the transition will become.
Related: Does It Pay To Become a Telecom Reseller?
To be clear, no single UCaaS system integrates with every single solution your clients may already have in place. The key, instead, is focusing on solutions that offer the most natural integration. For example, as MS Teams takes its place among the world’s most popular communications tools, the ability to integrate your UCaaS option with Teams may be something your customers specifically look for.
8. Advanced Reseller and Client Analytics
Part of the value proposition is in its name: the ability to unify communications for a business. The key features of this unification lead to a central opportunity to monitor, measure, and analyze all data related to the communications efforts of that business.
That might include analytics like call detail records, performance, and customer engagement. Internal interaction data and volumes also matter. Through dashboards and exportable reports, your clients should be able to understand both their communications efforts and the ways in which the solution they’ve purchased helps to improve those efforts.
In an ideal scenario, these analytics benefits can also extend to your own business. The UCaaS provider you work with may be able to provide client-agnostic data on metrics like uptime, performance, and more. That way, you can evaluate your clients’ success on the platform and jump in where needed to get them on the right track.
9. Around-the-Clock Client Support
Finally, and especially for resellers, communication solutions and client support become core needs in almost every scenario. While your own team may be able to help with everyday requests, chances are that there are still platform-specific issues that the system provider will have to take care of internally. For those instances, comprehensive client support becomes an essential UCaaS feature.
Look for solution providers that boast 24/7 real-time support, ideally with a chat option. The key is the timely resolution of any small issues that, if left unresolved, could turn into major problems. Another sign of a great partner is one who manages the infrastructure of the platform as well as critical updates that keep the system secure and running smoothly.
Once again, the types of clients you serve can influence what the best possible support looks like. For centralized on-premise businesses, in-person visits may rise in importance. For large enterprises, a dedicated support rep may be necessary to handle the volume of incoming requests. Regardless of the specific situation, an emphasis on support can be hugely beneficial.
Benefits of UCaaS for Business Growth
UCaaS solutions offer a multitude of benefits that can significantly contribute to business growth. Here are some of the key advantages:
Improved Collaboration and Communication: UCaaS solutions enhance collaboration by providing a unified platform where team members can easily communicate and share information, regardless of their location.
Increased Flexibility and Scalability: As businesses grow, their communication needs evolve. UCaaS solutions are designed to scale with the business, allowing for easy addition or removal of users and services.
Reduced Costs and Improved Cost Management: By consolidating multiple communication tools into a single platform, UCaaS solutions can reduce the overall cost of communication infrastructure and simplify cost management.
Enhanced Customer Experience and Engagement: With features like video conferencing and instant messaging, UCaaS solutions enable businesses to engage with customers more effectively, leading to improved customer satisfaction.
Improved Productivity and Efficiency: By streamlining communication processes and providing easy access to collaboration tools, UCaaS solutions can boost productivity and efficiency within the organization.
Better Integration with Existing Tools and Systems: UCaaS solutions are designed to integrate seamlessly with existing business tools and systems, ensuring a smooth transition and minimal disruption to business operations.
By leveraging these benefits, businesses can streamline their communication processes, reduce costs, and improve collaboration across teams, ultimately driving growth and success.
Future of UCaaS and Emerging Trends
The future of UCaaS is poised to be shaped by several emerging trends and technological advancements. Here are some key trends to watch:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML): AI and ML are expected to play a significant role in enhancing UCaaS solutions, with features like AI-powered chatbots, virtual assistants, and predictive analytics becoming more prevalent.
Internet of Things (IoT): The integration of IoT with UCaaS solutions will enable more connected and intelligent communication systems, providing businesses with new ways to interact and collaborate.
5G Networks: The rollout of 5G networks will provide faster and more reliable internet connections, enhancing the performance and capabilities of UCaaS solutions.
Cloud-Based Communication Platforms: The continued adoption of cloud-based communication platforms will drive the demand for UCaaS solutions, offering businesses greater flexibility and scalability.
Video Conferencing and Virtual Events: As remote work becomes more common, the demand for video conferencing and virtual event solutions will continue to grow, making these features essential components of UCaaS platforms.
Collaboration Tools and Platforms: The need for effective collaboration tools will drive the development of more advanced and integrated UCaaS solutions, enabling seamless communication and collaboration across teams.
In addition to these trends, there will be a growing focus on:
Security and Compliance: Ensuring data security and compliance with industry standards will remain a top priority for UCaaS providers.
Integration with Existing Tools and Systems: The ability to integrate UCaaS solutions with existing business tools and systems will be crucial for seamless adoption and minimal disruption.
User Experience and Interface: Enhancing the user experience and interface will be key to driving adoption and satisfaction with UCaaS solutions.
Scalability and Flexibility: UCaaS solutions will need to offer greater scalability and flexibility to meet the evolving needs of businesses.
Cost Management and ROI: Businesses will continue to seek UCaaS solutions that offer cost-effective communication tools and a strong return on investment.
As the UCaaS market continues to grow and evolve, staying up-to-date with these trends and technologies will be essential for businesses to remain competitive and fully leverage the benefits of UCaaS solutions.
Leverage the Power of Unified Communications With the Best UCaaS Features
Ultimately, the best UCaaS features go beyond the basics. Unified communication solutions, especially cloud-based ones, enhance business interactions through a single platform. Sure, those basics matter. But advanced benefits, from easy onboarding to ongoing support, analytics, cybersecurity, and third-party integrations, matter just as much, if not more, to get your clients the best possible UCaaS system for their needs.
SkySwitch, a next-generation UCaaS platform provider, is here to help you build your business’s reputation and serve your customers. We provide all the essentials to help grow your UCaaS reseller business and gain a solid source of recurring revenue. Business operations are constantly evolving, and we help you keep up by adding new features to our platform that meet your customers’ needs. Get started today to ensure the solution you select will benefit both you and your clients long-term.