UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, IaaS… the list of acronyms in the communications industry keeps growing. Now, there’s a new one: MultiCaaS. But unlike its predecessors, MultiCaaS represents a major consolidation trend rather than just another siloed solution.
With MultiCaaS, IT professionals and contact center leaders like you can manage one solution, while employees and agents collaborate through a unified app for both internal collaboration and customer-facing interactions.
Let’s dive into what MultiCaaS is, its benefits, and why it’s becoming a must for customer experience.
💡 What is MultiCaaS?
MultiCaaS refers to the consolidation of unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact center as a service (CCaaS) features into a single cloud-based communication platform.
This integration can come from:
- Single providers, like Cisco, Zoom and RingCentral.
- Integrated solutions, such as Microsoft Teams paired with AudioCodes’ Voca Conversational Interaction Center (CIC).
What are the benefits of MultiCaaS?
The departments fit to gain the most improvement from MultiCaaS is those set on customer experience. Especially internal departments like the IT Helpdesk, HR Team, Travel Desk, and Reception.
If you implement MultiCaaS you can experience one or more of these benefits:
Limit Screen Switching
Users can rely on integrations for a steady flow of collaboration and customer data in and out of a single application..
Easier IT Management
System operations, maintenance, and troubleshooting are kept to one team.
Improved First Call Resolution
Find the right employee or knowledge expert’s presence status and bring them into a customer service interaction with a single click.
Expanded CX To Other Departments
Internal service desks have access to contact center features for handling employee service needs.
Mobile Support
A mobile experience, whether over a mobile app or eSIM is available for customer service agents on the go, specifically helpful for medical, delivery, and logistic staff.
Why has MultiCaaS become a trend?
MultiCaaS has grown out of the need for an integrated communications and customer engagement solution.
Many organizations still run contact center and unified comms silos. When the contact center lives aside from the PBX, people like you are relied on to manage the two distinct infrastructures, while customer interactions play second to the main user group.
Life without MultiCaaS:
Only traditional contact center agents have access to IVR, queuing, reporting or other contact center capabilities. PBX users do not have access to these features.
Fragmented infrastructure requires its own dedicated maintenance, access and security handling.
The service workflow is disjointed. If a call to an agent needs to be escalated to a back-office expert, the transfer is blind and results in the loss of important data and reporting associated with the call.
A limited experience for IT, contact center leaders, agents, and customers.
But a noticeable shift away from separate communications providers.
Omdia’s 2023 survey of UCaaS end users found 60% of organizations plan to use the same provider for UCaaS and CCaaS.
In another study conducted by Metrigy, 44% of organizations are using a unified contact center and UC, while 29% plan to move to a consolidated platform in the following 12 months.
Life with MultiCaaS:
The real power of MultiCaaS is your investment compounding in one solution as the backbone for internal communication, collaboration, and customer engagement.
Traditional contact center agents, internal service desk employees, and everyday UC users have access to contact center features.
Rely on the same calling infrastructure, media quality, encryption, and security. Now you’re using the same credentials for cross-company management and there's no need to deal with another application. You’re using a single, consolidated platform and can reduce licensing and maintenance costs and simplify your IT management.
The service workflow maintains a path from customer inquiry to routing between back-office experts, and lastly to reporting on a successful interaction. The idea here is beautifully simple, yet powerful. MultiCaaS makes it easy to see the whole picture of interactions and performance without tying loose ends together for an educational guess.
What makes MultiCaaS different from UCaaS and CCaaS?
The creation of the MultiCaaS category doesn’t replace the need for a UCaaS or a CCaaS. Both communication solutions need to be present at your organization. What’s changed is how these solutions are delivered – together, not separate.
MultiCaaS combines the features of both UCaaS and CCaaS platforms to create a unified communication and customer engagement that allows you to:
- Connect any employee across the organization with a customer
- Reduce switching between apps during customer engagement
- Use the same telephony infrastructure for both platforms
- Reporting that follows calls routed across devices and departments
Use cases for standalone cloud-based UC and contact center solutions are still relevant. For instance, if you have a customer service department with thousands of agents and serving millions of customers (Visa, Delta Air Lines, Apple, etc.) your segment is better off using the likes of NICE, Genesys or the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center.
In the same vein, if you have a standalone CCaaS, your UCaaS platform will inherently be standalone too.
What UC providers offer MultiCaaS?
Cisco Webex, Zoom, RingCentral, Vonage, Intermedia, Dialpad, Nextiva and the list of MultiCaaS offering goes on... Nearly all the major UCaaS providers are at the point of offering contact center features. This Omdia report does well in explaining the details of a handful of MultiCaaS providers.
Ultimately, we’re finding unified comms are becoming a commodity. The feature tables across all of these providers are full of check marks, it just depends what price you’re willing to pay for the service.
I’m sure you’ve noticed the giant that’s missing from this list – Microsoft Teams. All the other offers are in-house MultiCaaS, while Microsoft is a bit different. Let’s take a look.
Microsoft Teams and MultiCaaS
Microsoft is the leader in the UCaaS market with Microsoft Teams. Boasting over 320 million monthly active users and more than 20 million Teams Phone users. However, when it comes to MultiCaaS, they do not offer a solution to match the full capabilities of a contact center.
What about Microsoft Dynamics 365 Contact Center? That’s a valid question. The Dynamics 365 (D365) Contact Center isn’t a true MultiCaaS offering with Teams. It’s a DIY contact center approach that focuses primarily on contact center and customer relationship manager (CRM) integration. The D365 Contact Center doesn’t have a Teams integration as its core focus, so it can’t be considered in the MultiCaaS category.
The Microsoft Queues App for Teams Premium
Microsoft does have the Queues App to advance Teams Phone customer engagement capabilities. The Queues App is a perfect queue management app for anyone who needs a lightweight customer service tool. All of this is available within the Queues App:
- Call queues with basic callback
- Basic IVR and Auto attendant
- Call monitoring, Whisper and Barge-in (in preview)
- Basic real-time reporting
- Historical reporting via PowerBI/CSV
But the Queues App isn’t a true contact center platform and requires purchase of a Teams Premium license. Currently, the Queues App doesn’t support:
- Skill-based routing
- Multi-level IVRs and IVAs with data dips
- Deep CRM integration
- Advanced reporting and analytics
- Conversational IVR/IVAs
- Omnichannel
Microsoft does offer MultiCaaS with the combination of Microsoft Teams and a certified Microsoft Teams contact center integration.
In a recent Metrigy report on, Successfully Integrating Microsoft Teams and Contact Center, Irwin Lazar mentions, “Integrating Microsoft Teams into the contact center offers significant benefits, including the ability for customer service agents and back-office employees to seamlessly engage with one another using the same voice, video, and messaging platform.”
Right now, there are nearly 30 certified Microsoft Teams contact center vendors. In a recent report, Omdia considers Voca Conversational Interaction Center as the only true MultiCaaS offering.
Why other Microsoft Teams-certified contact centers are not MultiCaaS
The core communication functionalities of Teams, like chat, video calls, and voice calls, are built on Azure Communication Services (ACS). If a contact center is built on ACS, it uses the same communication technology as Teams.
Most Teams-certified contact centers do not use ACS to build the underlying infrastructure of their contact center, instead they use a SIP-based integration, or one that’s based on the Microsoft Graph APIs.
In a new report published just a few weeks ago, Omdia mentions, “Many [Teams-certified contact centers] simply have session initiation protocol (SIP) integration for voice calls, and they merely appear as an additional icon on the left rail of the Microsoft Teams client, but they are not tightly integrated with Teams.”
How AudioCodes Voca CIC makes Microsoft Teams MultiCaaS
AudioCodes Voca CIC is an omnichannel contact center certified for Microsoft Teams. Omdia considers Voca CIC as the only true MultiCaaS offer for Microsoft teams, “…because it leverages the communication APIs of Microsoft Azure Communication Services just as Teams does, and like Teams, it operates within the Azure cloud.”
Voca CIC calling infrastructure:
Teams brings the UCaaS features like meetings, messaging, voice, and video, while Voca CIC brings the customer experience features needed to power-up a true Microsoft MultiCaaS.
Voca CIC’s core capabilities include:
- One-screen Agent Experience
- Pre-trained, embedded Conversational AI (NLU, TTS, & STT)
- Conversational IVR & Virtual Assistants
- No-code Visual Call Flow Designer
- Call Flow API Extensions (CRM, ERP, MS Power Automate, Copilot, etc.)
- Omnichannel Interactions (Voice, Webchat, Email)
- Agent & Supervisor Teams-based Apps
- Intelligent Routing (Skills, Agents, Groups, etc.)
- Teams Presence-based Routing
- Supervisor Live Monitoring
- Advanced Real-time Reporting & Historical Analytics
- CRM and 3rd-party bot integration over APIs
- Built-in Voicemail & Notifications
- Call Hunting Across Devices
Use Voca CIC for Microsoft Teams & Bring MultiCaaS to Your Organization
Voca CIC, a Microsoft Teams omnichannel contact center with built-in conversational AI, offers customer service lines the same 99.999% uptime and reliability as Microsoft Teams thanks to its Microsoft Azure infrastructure.
The fast and scalable design enables rapid deployment and growth across departments, along with the flexibility of a concurrent channel subscription model.
Voca CIC effortlessly extends CX capabilities to every Teams user within the company, whether they are part of the main service desk or other departments beyond the traditional contact center.
Voca CIC is available as a 30-day free trial on the AudioCodes website, as a native app on the Microsoft Teams Store or Microsoft AppSource.
