Shaping the Future of Work: The Transformative Power of UCaaS Solutions
In 2020 the global UCaaS market was valued at nearly $26 billion. Market analysts expect the value of this telecom solution to exceed at least $79 billion by the end of 2024. Widely appreciated for providing the features modern businesses require for efficient communication and collaboration, companies of all sizes are transitioning to UCaaS platforms to equip their teams with the best tools to grow their companies and meet their customers’ needs.
IT consultants, managed service providers, and other similar professionals are taking notice. They’re shaping the future of their companies by adding UCaaS services to their inventories. Although many have a background in telecom tech, most aren’t interested in absorbing the cost of building a UCaaS platform. Instead, they’re helping their clients take advantage of everything UCaaS offers (and increasing their brand value) by teaming up with white-label Unified Communication as a Service (UCaaS) platform providers.
Why UCaaS Solutions are the Future of Workplace Communication
Efficient business communication is essential for productivity, workforce engagement, and consumer satisfaction. As demand for omnichannel communication increases, business owners and IT decision-makers recognize the risks of resisting change. Not only are they tired of the costs of upgrading, maintaining, and repairing their aging legacy phone systems, they’re finding that managing their business with disparate technologies is inefficient, and they’re wasting money.
With UCaaS, companies get the best combination of cost-effective cloud-hosted services for their business without investing in multiple costly upgrades. In return, their teams’ communications are simplified into a user-friendly platform accessible from nearly any internet-capable device.
Modern business owners and IT decision-makers and their teams utilize the following features and enhanced capabilities of UCaaS-supported omnichannel solutions for their daily communication needs, boosting workplace productivity and improving communication efficiency.
Related: What is a UCaaS platform, and how can it help my clients?
Cloud-Hosted Voice
Most businesses pay a monthly fee for every company phone line, plus additional costs for long-distance calls and other international services, and are also forced to pay the high price of keeping their on-premises technology functional. Increasingly, modern businesses are paying for phone lines they seldom use and services they rarely need.
With UCaaS, incoming and outgoing calls are converted to digital packets and transmitted over the Internet. Since the service is virtual, business owners and their management teams can add as many phone numbers to their network as they need without the expense of installing additional PRI circuits.
Even small business owners and entrepreneurs without the means to invest in a traditional business phone can utilize cloud-hosted voice and an impressive number of enterprise features by installing a softphone on PCs, laptops, tablets, or smartphones or using their existing phone technology.
Furthermore, businesses that use cloud-hosted voice solutions also enjoy greater security and more stable uptime, as cloud-hosted solutions aren’t affected by unexpected events like natural disasters that could impact service continuity.
For example, in 2019, Facebook lost $90 million due to a 14-hour network outage. Few companies are the size of Facebook, but downtime is costly, regardless of the size of your business, and should be mitigated.
Audio and Video Conferencing
With many companies transitioning to remote or hybrid work, video conferencing is essential for workplace collaboration as the next-best alternative to face-to-face meetings. Although the number of remote meetings lasting more than 60 minutes has decreased since 2020, the number of meetings lasting 30 minutes or less has increased.
But only some of that time is productive. Too many virtual meetings start late due to poor connections and software issues. UCaaS helps smooth out the rough edges by supporting voice conferencing, video conferencing, remote access, and webinars from a single user-friendly application for your clients’ video conferencing needs.
Business SMS
Short message service (SMS) transmits messages between digital devices. It’s the oldest and most widely used of the many texting technologies based on a standardized protocol. Companies pay to use the technology for customer engagement, sending alerts and appointment reminders, and promoting special offers.
Since legacy phone systems don’t support SMS, many business owners are losing out on the advantages of connecting with their clients in their clients’ preferred communication channels. With UCaaS, business owners and their teams benefit from “teachable” AI-enhanced SMS technology capable of “conversational” responses to customer inquiries and appropriate actions initiated by real-time interactive reactions.
Call Center Support
Most traditional call centers charge premium prices for services that don’t support the evolving needs of a remote or hybrid workforce, forcing employees to use the company’s traditional, onsite-only PBX setup instead of an internet-based, location-agnostic telephony solution.
For most businesses, virtual call centers are a cost-effective alternative. It’s a UCaaS feature that grants business owners, their teams, and their customers the advantage of having receptionists and customer service representatives on staff without tying the employees to a specific location.
Call center representatives can also be tasked with booking appointments, taking messages, forwarding calls, and providing remote workers with dial-in numbers, links, and access codes to important meetings.
Some UCaaS solutions are even equipped with appointment reminder capabilities, enabling their call center staff to schedule voice- or SMS-based reminder messages for clients, adding another level of customer care to call center solutions.
Application Integration
Your clients likely have established customer relations management (CRM) tools they use with their existing communications platform and will be reluctant to switch to a new communication solution if they are concerned they will be forced to change their CRM, too.
However, with standard-based APIs, business owners can incorporate multiple applications and integrations — including customer relations management (CRM) tools, data analytics software, and workflow solutions — into their UCaaS solution. UCaaS subscribers can fully integrate third-party applications into their dashboards, ensuring their team members aren’t forced to leave behind their familiar CRM or other critical software.
How the Future of Business Communication Benefits UCaaS Resellers and Their Clients
Numerous companies are offering white-label telecom solutions, but many offer a limited number of features. Branding and reselling white-label UCaaS allows nearly anyone with an existing customer base to establish their business as a “one-stop-shop” for the seamless, omnichannel solutions shaping the future of business communication.
The best UCaaS platform providers manage and maintain the physical infrastructure, develop future technologies, and provide the training to help their reseller partners deliver exceptional customer service and support.
In turn, their reseller partners own the customer experience, with the flexibility to offer the bespoke solutions bundles that best suit their clients’ needs and the autonomy to craft the messaging and marketing aesthetics that fit their brand.
Whether you’re considering adding UCaaS to your business services or looking for a way to build a brand on a reseller agreement, establishing your position as a premier provider of in-demand UCaaS services can be easier than you might expect.
With so many companies navigating the challenges of increasing overhead costs, the limitations of legacy technology, and the burden of keeping their remote team members connected, your services will essentially sell themselves. Consider incorporating the following benefits in your UCaaS sales messaging to your clients.
Related: How to grow your business with white-label cloud solutions
Cost-Effective, Scalable Workplace Solutions
UCaaS platforms give business owners greater control over their communication costs than legacy phone services because they’re not offering a one-size-fits-all solution. As a UCaaS reseller, your customers are free to select from a customizable stack of communication solutions, and they can scale their service as those needs evolve.
In addition to reducing your customers’ overhead costs, you’re also offering the tools they need to optimize productivity and workplace efficiency. Since there’s no need to maintain complex onsite hardware, your scalable services also help them reduce (or eliminate) the need for in-house professionals to troubleshoot software incompatibilities and keep aging analog systems functioning.
But before partnering with any company offering white-label UCaaS, it’s essential to understand the structure of their contract and the requirements for their reselling partners. The best platform partners make it easy to launch your UCaaS service. Their startup costs are minimal, and they allow you to set your own prices. With your platform provider’s support, you should have everything you need for success from day one.
Help Determining If UCaaS is the Right Fit for Your Brand
For many resellers, adding UCaaS to their product offerings will be the right fit for many resellers, and they’ll enjoy earning up to 70% or more on their returns from selling UCaaS. But with so many platform providers to choose from, resellers should seek a provider who is prepared to answer resellers’ questions about their platform’s features and their continued partnerships with resellers.
Search for a provider who offers product demonstrations to present the product’s main benefits, provides a comprehensive overview of their platform, explains the training you can expect from them to help you master their solution and assist your clients, and also gives a detailed explanation of the service and support you can expect from them as your partner.
After choosing a platform provider, their sales representative should guide you through the partnership agreement and connect you with a dedicated onboarding specialist ready to guide you through their training program and get you prepared to sell.
Comprehensive One-on-One Onboarding
Over several weeks, your new onboarding specialist should provide you and your team with tools and resources to sell, manage, and market your new UCaaS solution. Some providers even offer a combination of online self-paced courses and live webinars, in addition to your dedicated onboarding specialist answering your questions.
Expect that the first few weeks of training will involve watching instructional videos and completing quizzes, alongside real-world, hands-on training to reinforce your new knowledge. You’ll learn how to brand your service, make the best use of the platform’s marketing tools and templates, and the ins and outs of providing service and technical support to your customers.
Ideally, as your learning progresses, the focus will shift to one-on-one training with your onboarding specialist, who can answer questions and provide solutions specific to your business and needs, taking your knowledge from theoretical to practical, and giving you a preview of what to expect once you’re ready to launch.
A normal, comprehensive training schedule can take 7-12 weeks to complete. Once the training is finished, you will be fully equipped to offer your white-label UCaaS solution.
Continuous Support as You Gain Experience
A quality provider will continue supporting your training, reselling, and operations even after successfully launching your product. The provider partner should have a strategy for guiding and cultivating their reseller partners, even after resellers have graduated from the training program.
Before you sign with a provider, ask the sales representative what support you can expect from them during your first weeks after you’ve completed your training and have launched the solution. Your partner’s guidance shouldn’t diminish once you’re certified; it should expand.
After moving beyond the initial onboarding training, you should be paired with a dedicated service representative who’s prepared to provide general support, additional coaching, and product troubleshooting. Over time, you’ll gain confidence in your knowledge of the platform and its main selling points, but your service rep should remain ever-ready to assist you when needed.
Ensure your provider also offers an online knowledge base for their resellers, publishing articles, graphics, and videos on technical information, sales and marketing tips, platform operation support, and compliance guidelines to supplement your knowledge and give quick answers for simple issues.
Could the Transformative Power of UCaaS Shape the Future of Your Brand?
UCaaS brings the transformative power of cloud-hosted voice, file sharing, video collaboration, application integration, and business SMS (and more) to a single user-friendly platform accessible from nearly any internet capable-device. When you partner with the right white-label UCaaS platform provider, you’ll have everything you need to brand and resell a fully-managed service, including 24/7 reseller support.
To discover how the transformative power of UCaaS could shape the future of your brand, visit SkySwitch to submit a contact form. With SkySwitch University and the support of a dedicated onboarding specialist, you can master and deploy our system in as little as seven weeks.