The business side of IT
UCaaS and CCaaS: what the letters mean
Phone providers love acronyms. Two come up more than any other, and knowing the difference makes it easier to buy the right thing.
1 min readExplainer
The short version
Two acronyms you will meet when shopping for business phones, and how to tell which one you need.
UCaaS: everyday communication in one place
Unified communications as a service puts calls, voicemail, messaging and video meetings in one system, run in the cloud by a provider. Your team uses one app and one number, at the desk or on the go.
It suits most businesses: anyone who makes and takes calls as part of the day.
CCaaS: handling a lot of incoming calls
Contact center as a service is built for teams whose main job is answering customers, such as a front desk, a support line or a reservations team. It adds tools for handling many calls at once:
- Call queues, so callers wait in line instead of hearing a busy signal.
- Routing, which sends each caller to the right person or group.
- Reports on how many calls came in, how long people waited and how many hung up.
Which do you need?
- Most of your calls are between colleagues, clients and suppliers: start with UCaaS.
- A team spends most of the day answering customers: look at CCaaS for that team, alongside UCaaS for everyone else.
- Not sure: count how many calls come in at your busiest hour, and how many are missed.
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