Tag: unified communications

CCaaS Lite

Written by Laura Swatton on 10 June 2025. Posted in Blog. No Comments on CCaaS Lite

CCaaS Lite: Combining UCaaS and CCaaS for a smarter approach

The Rise of CCaaS Lite

Contact Centre technology has long presented businesses with a stark choice: invest in a fully-featured Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) platform, or rely on a more basic Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) system.

The Cost Conundrum

For many organisations, these two options present an uncomfortable reality: forced to choose between comprehensive CCaaS solutions, packed with features that many employees may never use, or settling for inadequate customer service tools.

If your team isn’t fully leveraging a CCaaS platform, it can start to feel like an unnecessary expense, especially when CCaaS typically costs 7–10 times more per seat than UCaaS. While CCaaS undoubtedly offers powerful customer engagement capabilities, not every business needs the full suite, nor do all employees require advanced features.

Take, for example, a mid-sized company with 50 employees, where only 10 handle customer interactions. Paying premium CCaaS rates for those 10 users, while the remaining 40 use standard UCaaS, results in a cost structure that is hard to justify.

Fortunately, a more flexible and cost-effective middle ground is emerging – CCaaS Lite. This approach bridges the gap between UCaaS and full-featured CCaaS by allowing companies to selectively add key customer engagement tools to their existing UCaaS solution.

Emergence of CCaaS Lite

Instead of an all-or-nothing investment, more businesses are taking a smarter route, building their own CCaaS Lite solutions by integrating targeted contact centre features into their current UCaaS platforms. This “pick and mix” strategy empowers organisations to create bespoke customer service capabilities without incurring the costs of a full CCaaS deployment.

Popular CCaaS Lite Add-ons Include:

Dynamic Reporting: Real-time dashboards and customisable reports provide managers with the insights needed to optimise performance and enhance customer satisfaction.
Wallboards and Visibility Tools: Visual displays show queue status, key performance indicators, and metrics, keeping teams aligned and responsive.
Enhanced Analytics Suite: Advanced data analysis helps identify trends, measure success, and inform decisions around resource allocation and operational improvements.
Secure Compliant Call Recording: Ensure regulatory compliance and maintain quality standards.
Multi-Channel Communication: Support for WhatsApp, live chat, and social messaging channels, meeting customers where they are with omnichannel customer engagement
AI-Powered Tools: Smart automation, including chatbots, sentiment analysis, and automated responses, boosts efficiency while retaining the human touch that customers value.

Why it works

This smart, tailored approach delivers several key benefits:

Cost Efficiency: Pay only for the features your team needs, reducing per-seat costs while getting the functionality that drives results.
Scalability: Add features as your business grows or evolves, perfect for adapting to seasonal demand or expanding operations.
Faster Implementation: Integrating new features into an existing UCaaS system typically involves less disruption and quicker deployment than full CCaaS rollouts.

The Strategic Sweet Spot:

For many organisations, especially in the mid-market, CCaaS Lite hits the strategic sweet spot. It recognises that not every business requires enterprise-level contact centre capabilities, while also acknowledging that basic UCaaS features may fall short for today’s customer service expectations.

This approach is particularly valuable for businesses navigating growth, shifting service needs, or fluctuating demand. Instead of locking themselves into costly, oversized solutions, companies can build their customer engagement toolkit incrementally and sensibly.

Breaking down the crossover

The right choice for you

More businesses are realising that they don’t have to choose between high-end CCaaS and budget-friendly UCaaS. Instead, they’re crafting the right blend of features to match their needs and resources.

If you’re reviewing your customer communication strategy, the real question isn’t “UCaaS or CCaaS?” It’s how to combine the right features to serve your customers effectively without breaking the bank.

We’d love to help, as here at Evoke Telecom, we’ll work with you to design a solution that fits your needs and your budget. After all, the best communication solution isn’t the one with the most features, it’s the one that gets used and delivers measurable results for your business.

Ready to explore what CCaaS Lite could look like for your organisation? Get in touch today, we’d be delighted to show you what’s possible.

A female call centre employee at a desk speaking into a telephone headset A female call centre employee at a desk speaking into a telephone headset

Make it easier for customers to engage with your organisation with a new breed of CCaaS

Written by Laura Swatton on 22 March 2021. Posted in Blog.

This month’s product update focusses on the brand-new Horizon Contact Cloud based, omni-channel contact centre. It’s quite a topical one as organisations looking at ‘hybrid working’ and driving a ‘work from anywhere’ culture need to consider not just UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service or cloud telephony) but CCaaS (Contact Centre as a Service) as the next phase of development in measuring and managing a dispersed workforce, embracing AI (Artificial Intelligence) whilst ensuring that customer service levels are upheld and exceeded.

What is Horizon Contact?

Horizon Contact is a cloud-based omni-channel contact centre solution (voice, email and web chat) that is designed specifically to work in conjunction with Horizon and Collaborate (the Horizon UC solutions).

Perfect for organisations who want to make it easier for customers to engage with them and unlike most Contact Centre solutions, Horizon Contact provides an easy to use, self-service feature set, for small to medium businesses. This is ideal for organisations looking to incorporate AI at an affordable price point.

Here are some of the key benefits that we think rock!

Ideal for Hybrid Working – Agents can log into any device and work anytime, anywhere. The solution is compatible with all current Gamma handsets, but agents can also work with just a laptop and headset because Horizon Contact uses WebRTC to deliver the same experience wherever your teams have internet access.
Integral CRM – Built in CRM database that may be used to keep track of customer interactions to ensure customers don’t need to repeat themselves every time they call in or equally, Horizon Contact can integrate with MS Dynamics or Salesforce for full CRM integration and end to end visibility of your customer journeys.
Comprehensive Call Recording – Calls can be recorded inbound, outbound or internal. Callers can also be provided with the choice to opt out of their call being recorded however, the agent can still select to record their part of the call. Call recordings are stored in a secure, encrypted environment with other GDPR compliant features such as retention deletion, restricted user access and full user auditing.
Gold Standard Customer Service – Calls can be prioritised into VIP queues to be handled by skills ranked agents, based on either the customers telephone number or email to ensure they are provided with a tailored and premium service.
Flexible Reporting – The built in, comprehensive reporting tool which can be viewed within the portal enables reports to be scheduled and delivered to managers as and when they need them.
True Subscription Model – There are no financing costs, no major hardware investments, and no software to roll out. You simply need a Horizon Premium subscription and then either an agent or supervisor licence, Admin licences are provided free of charge.
Reduced TCO – There is no charge for terminating inbound calls like many other CCaaS platforms.
Reliable Distributed architecture – At least 99.9% uptime is expected with four Gamma data centres hosting the Horizon Contact service.
Agent Interface – Agents can view all the queues that they have been given access to view. Agents can take calls via a Horizon handset or via a softphone using the Horizon Contact portal.
Supervisor Interface – The Supervisor user has full agent functionality but can manage all agent users. Within the Horizon Contact Portal, the Supervisor’s main screen shows live data for both the queues and the agents that they manage.
Admin Interface – Horizon Contact is managed using its own web interface, which provides information and management control to authenticated operations users. The Administrator Portal part of the interface allows users who are logged in at the Administrator level to customise their Contact Centre features and functionality.
Wallboard – When an agent has classified an interaction, the classifications are logged and analysed by the Contact Centre for display via the wallboard and for inclusion in regular reports.