Organizations are continuing to adopt and expand deployments of new Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions to access enhanced functionality for enterprise collaboration and their contact centers. These solutions can allow for more streamlined internal and external communications, improved productivity, better employee and customer satisfaction, and more centralized, secure management.
Historically, internal communications and contact center applications have been purchased separately, administered by different teams, and were not integrated in a meaningful way for common users, such as call center agents. With the current cloud-centric transition, enterprise IT and operations leaders realize there is an opportunity to centralize and consolidate how they manage UCaaS and CCaaS solutions and find synergies within their underlying infrastructure.
Companies operating globally or across multiple countries must evolve one key aspect of their UCaaS and CCaaS deployment: the voice channel. UCaaS and CCaaS transformations present a great opportunity to move voice infrastructure to the cloud to unlock new use cases, streamline IT management, gain greater visibility, and lower costs. Left unaddressed, legacy telephony environments can be a significant blocker to achieving UCaaS and CCaaS business objectives, slow deployment timelines, create user frustration, and ultimately drive costs up.
The Evolution of Enterprise Voice Management
The enterprise communications landscape has transformed dramatically. What was once a disparate combination of localized PSTN connections has evolved into a connected web of platforms and services:
Contact center voice
for inbound and outbound customer service and sales.
Enterprise Communications
for internal collaboration and connecting externally.
Hybrid environments
combining legacy systems with modern cloud solutions.
Why Fragmented Voice Doesn't Work in a Combined UCaaS and CCaaS World
For IT teams managing enterprise voice communications, these fragmented environments create significant operational burdens:
Quality Management Becomes a Moving Target
IT administrators find themselves juggling different quality standards and metrics across regions. When users in Asia report poor call quality while European operations run smoothly, teams must navigate multiple carrier relationships, different troubleshooting processes, and varying service level agreements – often during the same incident.
Troubleshooting Turns
into Detective Work
When voice issues arise, IT teams must first determine which provider handles the affected region or service before they can begin resolution. This provider-by-provider approach turns what should be straightforward troubleshooting into complex investigations, often requiring coordination across multiple support teams and time zones.
Visibility Gaps Hinder Proactive Management
Without a unified view of global operations, IT teams struggle to identify and address issues before they impact users. Each provider typically offers their own monitoring tools and dashboards, creating data silos that make it impossible to get a complete picture of voice service performance. This reactive position not only frustrates users but also prevents teams from optimizing their voice infrastructure effectively.
Cost Control Becomes
a Full-Time Job
Managing multiple contracts means dealing with different pricing structures, renewal dates, and minimum commitments across providers. Finance teams need extensive support from IT to understand and validate charges, while procurement teams must maintain relationships with multiple vendors. The inability to leverage total volume for better pricing often results in higher costs across the board.
Administrative Overhead
Drains Resources
Beyond technical management, teams must maintain updated documentation for different provider processes, manage multiple sets of credentials, and coordinate across various provider portals and support systems. This administrative burden often requires dedicated headcount just to manage the complexity, taking resources away from strategic initiatives that could drive business value.
Feature Fragmentation
Across Regions
When voice services are delivered through multiple providers or platforms, feature availability often becomes inconsistent across regions. Teams in different locations work with distinctly different toolsets - while users in Asia might have access to advanced spam filtering, their European counterparts may lack this essential protection. Call recording capabilities, quality monitoring tools, and basic number management features can vary dramatically between locations. This inconsistency creates significant challenges for global organizations trying to maintain standardized operations.
Limited AI and
Analytics Potential
As communications platforms become increasingly intelligent, fragmented voice infrastructure creates significant barriers to leveraging advanced analytics and AI capabilities effectively. Consider security monitoring: when voice traffic is split across multiple platforms, it becomes nearly impossible to detect patterns like the same caller ID probing different numbers across the organization—a common sign of social engineering attempts. This fragmentation extends beyond security concerns into all aspects of voice analytics.
Understanding the Options
for International Voice
IT and contact center operations leaders have a few different approaches they can take to construct a voice solution for their organizations. When breaking down this decision, it’s useful to understand the options that exist based on what providers offer – based on the CCaaS and UCaaS vendors you select, this will inevitably shape what pathways exist to creating an optimal voice solution for your enterprise voice coverage:
UCaaS and CCaaS Provided Voice
Some UCaaS and CCaaS platforms choose to white-label voice services from major carriers, presenting it as their own offering. While this can provide a single voice and application vendor within a respective UCaaS and CCaaS environment, it means customers have less control and access to voice partners and related support, and their voice calling and number capabilities will vary from enterprise communications and contact center use cases.
Finally, while some leading CCaaS providers offer global voice coverage, the largest UCaaS providers have significant coverage and virtual number gaps in regions like Asia, South America, Africa and the Middle East.
Hybrid Models
Some UCaaS and CCaaS providers rely on a mixture of offering voice services directly and an ecosystem of partners and integrations.
Other platforms maintain an open marketplace of certified voice providers. This offers more choice but requires IT leaders to evaluate and manage relationships with additional vendors. While offering flexibility, this approach can add complexity to vendor management and support processes.
Many platforms use a combination of these approaches - perhaps offering direct coverage in their primary markets while leveraging partnerships for international reach. This can create a confusing patchwork of solutions, capabilities, and support processes for enterprise customers to navigate.
This complex landscape creates significant challenges for IT leaders who must look beyond basic coverage maps. Understanding how voice services are actually delivered in each region becomes critical, as it directly impacts who handles support when inevitable issues arise. This becomes even more complicated when organizations need to expand into new markets, as the underlying service delivery model might change entirely. The end result is often a patchwork of different quality levels and feature sets across regions, making it difficult to maintain consistent service standards and troubleshoot issues effectively.
Direct Carrier Relationships
There are two distinct approaches to direct carrier relationships in the market today:
Regional Direct Relationships
Many platforms maintain direct relationships with carriers in specific regions or countries. This approach can work well within their core markets, where they have established relationships and dedicated teams managing local carriers. However, this model becomes increasingly complex as organizations expand globally. Each new market requires new carrier relationships, different contracts, and separate support processes. While effective for regional operations, this approach makes it challenging to maintain consistent quality and features across a global enterprise.
Global Cloud Provider Partnerships
The emergence of global cloud voice providers offers a different approach. These providers maintain a unified network of carrier relationships worldwide, effectively creating a single layer of voice infrastructure that can span both UCaaS and CCaaS platforms. This model is particularly crucial for organizations seeking to unify their voice management across platforms. Rather than managing multiple regional relationships or dealing with platform-specific voice solutions, enterprises can leverage a single global provider to deliver consistent quality, features, and support across all their communications platforms. This approach becomes increasingly valuable as organizations look to enable seamless movement between UCaaS and CCaaS applications, providing the foundation needed for truly unified enterprise communications.
The Benefits of Unified Voice Management
Organizations are increasingly recognizing the value of consolidating their voice services under a single expert provider. Key benefits include:
Consistent Global Coverage
Single source for all number types across regions
Simplified procurement and provisioning
Standardized service levels
Unified UCaaS and CCaaS Functionality
Ensure international calling capabilities across all users
Route calls from agents to experts
Integrate UCaaS and CCaaS voice can with related systems (e.g., AI)
Enhanced Visibility and Control
Centralized analytics and reporting
Unified quality metrics
Comprehensive traffic insights
Operational Efficiency
Streamlined troubleshooting
Reduced management overhead
Simplified vendor relationships
Cost Optimization
Volume-based pricing advantages
Reduced administrative costs
Better resource allocation
Effortless Call Transitions
Transfer calls between CCaaS and UCaaS platforms without dropping the customer or degrading call quality.
Voice infrastructure must maintain call context and quality as conversations move between platforms.
Call recording and compliance requirements must be maintained across platform transitions.
Expert Accessibility
Contact center agents need visibility into the availability of internal experts using UCaaS platforms.
Voice systems must support easy conference bridging between platforms.
Quality and features must remain consistent when bringing in participants from different platforms.
Unified Experience
Customers should experience seamless transitions regardless of how many internal platform switches occur.
Call quality must remain consistent as conversations move between contact center agents and internal experts.
Voice infrastructure should support consistent features (recording, monitoring, etc.) across all platforms.
Best Practices for Implementation
Successfully managing voice across platforms requires careful planning and execution:
Build the Right Team
Determine long-term ownership of voice:
Ultimately, having a clear voice leader is important for unified stack management. It helps drive decisions, ensure consistency in decision-making, and align with vendors. The more fragmented the ownership, the more fragmented the solution is likely to be.
Ensure proper organizational structure:
While leadership is important, the team around that leadership is equally important. Voice requires specific technical expertise, financial discipline, and vendor management. Get the right stakeholders defined and involved.
Know your business owners:
Voice is a critical technology that many expect just to work. However, given it can impact many in the organization, staying aligned and capturing feedback from relevant business executives, contact center leaders, and end users is an important process. (Executive leadership, contact center operations, and end users that interact with the technology.)
Assessment and Planning
Audit current voice infrastructure:
When looking to unify your voice solution, determine the current state of the infrastructure. This baseline provides a starting point for building a long-term roadmap.
Document regional requirements:
Geographic requirements may differ due to internal (e.g., differing technology stacks) or external (telecom regulations) forces. Understand what they are and how they can impact the approach.
Define quality metrics and SLAs:
What does success look like? Technical factors such as MOS score and business metrics, like answer rates, about voice performance are important to identify and track.
Migration Strategy
Map the migration:
Some migrations are straightforward. Others require a phased approach, such as by region or department. Align with your voice team to determine what makes sense for your situation.
Precise testing and validation procedures:
Whenever changing components of your voice solution, ensuring the solution will work is critical before going live. Work carefully with your vendor, who should be heavily guiding the process, to make this happen.
Comprehensive training and documentation:
Capture all relevant information on your new solution, update past or create new documents and ensure users understand what they need to know. Again, a leading vendor partner should help support this effort.
Ongoing Optimization
Proactive issue resolution:
The lowest impact outage is the one that never happens. Use scalable tools or services that allow you to rapidly respond to problems or stop them before they become real issues.
Regular performance monitoring:
Continuously monitor and report on key technical and business metrics to ensure trends stay constant or move in a positive direction.
Manage your number inventory:
With tens of thousands of numbers to manage across your enterprise and contact center, companies need to organize their numbers to ensure they are being used and report on that usage as needed. Structuring your inventory effectively allows you to ensure spending is being deployed effectively and, when needed, provides a starting point for large projects, such as porting.
Future-Proofing Your Voice Strategy
As you develop your voice management strategy, consider these key factors:
Scalability
Ensure your solution can grow with your business
Emerging Technologies
Plan for AI integration and advanced analytics
Platform Evolution
Stay flexible as UCaaS and CCaaS platforms evolve
Geographic Expansion
Choose solutions that support your growth plans
The Path Forward
Managing voice across UCaaS and CCaaS platforms doesn't have to be complicated. By partnering with a global voice expert, organizations can simplify their voice infrastructure while ensuring premium quality and coverage worldwide.
Want to learn more about optimizing your voice strategy?
Contact our team of voice experts to discuss your specific needs.
Organizations are continuing to adopt and expand deployments of new Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) solutions to access enhanced functionality for enterprise collaboration and their contact centers. These solutions can allow for more streamlined internal and external communications, improved productivity, better employee and customer satisfaction, and more centralized, secure management.
Historically, internal communications and contact center applications have been purchased separately, administered by different teams, and were not integrated in a meaningful way for common users, such as call center agents. With the current cloud-centric transition, enterprise IT and operations leaders realize there is an opportunity to centralize and consolidate how they manage UCaaS and CCaaS solutions and find synergies within their underlying infrastructure.
Companies operating globally or across multiple countries must evolve one key aspect of their UCaaS and CCaaS deployment: the voice channel. UCaaS and CCaaS transformations present a great opportunity to move voice infrastructure to the cloud to unlock new use cases, streamline IT management, gain greater visibility, and lower costs. Left unaddressed, legacy telephony environments can be a significant blocker to achieving UCaaS and CCaaS business objectives, slow deployment timelines, create user frustration, and ultimately drive costs up.
Contact center voice
for customer service and sales.
Enterprise Communications
for internal collaboration, sales interactions, and expert support.
Hybrid environments
combining legacy systems with modern cloud solutions.
Quality Management
Becomes a Moving Target
IT administrators find themselves juggling different quality standards and metrics across regions. When users in Asia report poor call quality while European operations run smoothly, teams must navigate multiple carrier relationships, different troubleshooting processes, and varying service level agreements – often during the same incident.
Troubleshooting Turns
into Detective Work
When voice issues arise, IT teams must first determine which provider handles the affected region or service before they can begin resolution. This provider-by-provider approach turns what should be straightforward troubleshooting into complex investigations, often requiring coordination across multiple support teams and time zones.
Visibility Gaps Hinder Proactive Management
Without a unified view of global operations, IT teams struggle to identify and address issues before they impact users. Each provider typically offers their own monitoring tools and dashboards, creating data silos that make it impossible to get a complete picture of voice service performance. This reactive position not only frustrates users but also prevents teams from optimizing their voice infrastructure effectively.
Cost Control Becomes
a Full-Time Job
Managing multiple contracts means dealing with different pricing structures, renewal dates, and minimum commitments across providers. Finance teams need extensive support from IT to understand and validate charges, while procurement teams must maintain relationships with multiple vendors. The inability to leverage total volume for better pricing often results in higher costs across the board.
Administrative Overhead
Drains Resources
Beyond technical management, teams must maintain updated documentation for different provider processes, manage multiple sets of credentials, and coordinate across various provider portals and support systems. This administrative burden often requires dedicated headcount just to manage the complexity, taking resources away from strategic initiatives that could drive business value.
Feature Fragmentation
Across Regions
When voice services are delivered through multiple providers or platforms, feature availability often becomes inconsistent across regions. Teams in different locations work with distinctly different toolsets - while users in Asia might have access to advanced spam filtering, their European counterparts may lack this essential protection. Call recording capabilities, quality monitoring tools, and basic number management features can vary dramatically between locations. This inconsistency creates significant challenges for global organizations trying to maintain standardized operations.
Limited AI and
Analytics Potential
As communications platforms become increasingly intelligent, fragmented voice infrastructure creates significant barriers to leveraging advanced analytics and AI capabilities effectively. Consider security monitoring: when voice traffic is split across multiple platforms, it becomes nearly impossible to detect patterns like the same caller ID probing different numbers across the organization—a common sign of social engineering attempts. This fragmentation extends beyond security concerns into all aspects of voice analytics.
UCaaS and CCaaS Provided Voice
Some UCaaS and CCaaS platforms choose to white-label voice services from major carriers, presenting it as their own offering. While this can provide a single voice and application vendor within a respective UCaaS and CCaaS environment, it means customers have less control and access to voice partners and related support, and their voice calling and number capabilities will vary from enterprise communications and contact center use cases.
Finally, while some leading CCaaS providers offer global voice coverage, the largest UCaaS providers have significant coverage and virtual number gaps in regions like Asia, South America, Africa and the Middle East.
Hybrid Models
Some UCaaS and CCaaS providers rely on a mixture of offering voice services directly and an ecosystem of partners and integrations.
Other platforms maintain an open marketplace of certified voice providers. This offers more choice but requires IT leaders to evaluate and manage relationships with additional vendors. While offering flexibility, this approach can add complexity to vendor management and support processes.
Many platforms use a combination of these approaches - perhaps offering direct coverage in their primary markets while leveraging partnerships for international reach. This can create a confusing patchwork of solutions, capabilities, and support processes for enterprise customers to navigate.
This complex landscape creates significant challenges for IT leaders who must look beyond basic coverage maps. Understanding how voice services are actually delivered in each region becomes critical, as it directly impacts who handles support when inevitable issues arise. This becomes even more complicated when organizations need to expand into new markets, as the underlying service delivery model might change entirely. The end result is often a patchwork of different quality levels and feature sets across regions, making it difficult to maintain consistent service standards and troubleshoot issues effectively.
Direct Carrier Relationships
There are two distinct approaches to direct carrier relationships in the market today:
Regional Direct Relationships
Many platforms maintain direct relationships with carriers in specific regions or countries. This approach can work well within their core markets, where they have established relationships and dedicated teams managing local carriers. However, this model becomes increasingly complex as organizations expand globally. Each new market requires new carrier relationships, different contracts, and separate support processes. While effective for regional operations, this approach makes it challenging to maintain consistent quality and features across a global enterprise.
Global Cloud Provider Partnerships
The emergence of global cloud voice providers offers a different approach. These providers maintain a unified network of carrier relationships worldwide, effectively creating a single layer of voice infrastructure that can span both UCaaS and CCaaS platforms. This model is particularly crucial for organizations seeking to unify their voice management across platforms. Rather than managing multiple regional relationships or dealing with platform-specific voice solutions, enterprises can leverage a single global provider to deliver consistent quality, features, and support across all their communications platforms. This approach becomes increasingly valuable as organizations look to enable seamless movement between UCaaS and CCaaS applications, providing the foundation needed for truly unified enterprise communications.
Consistent Global Coverage
Single source for all number types across regions
Simplified procurement and provisioning
Standardized service levels
Unified UCaaS and CCaaS Functionality
Ensure international calling capabilities across all users
Route calls from agents to experts
Integrate UCaaS and CCaaS voice can with related systems (e.g., AI)
Enhanced Visibility and Control
Centralized analytics and reporting
Unified quality metrics
Comprehensive traffic insights
Operational Efficiency
Streamlined troubleshooting
Reduced management overhead
Simplified vendor relationships
Cost Optimization
Volume-based pricing advantages
Reduced administrative costs
Better resource allocation
Effortless Call Transitions
Transfer calls between CCaaS and UCaaS platforms without dropping the customer or degrading call quality.
Voice infrastructure must maintain call context and quality as conversations move between platforms.
Call recording and compliance requirements must be maintained across platform transitions.
Expert Accessibility
Contact center agents need visibility into the availability of internal experts using UCaaS platforms.
Voice systems must support easy conference bridging between platforms.
Quality and features must remain consistent when bringing in participants from different platforms.
Unified Experience
Customers should experience seamless transitions regardless of how many internal platform switches occur.
Call quality must remain consistent as conversations move between contact center agents and internal experts.
Voice infrastructure should support consistent features (recording, monitoring, etc.) across all platforms.
Build the Right Team
Determine long-term ownership of voice:
Ultimately, having a clear voice leader is important for unified stack management. It helps drive decisions, ensure consistency in decision-making, and align with vendors. The more fragmented the ownership, the more fragmented the solution is likely to be.
Ensure proper organizational structure:
While leadership is important, the team around that leadership is equally important. Voice requires specific technical expertise, financial discipline, and vendor management. Get the right stakeholders defined and involved.
Know your business owners:
Voice is a critical technology that many expect just to work. However, given it can impact many in the organization, staying aligned and capturing feedback from relevant business executives, contact center leaders, and end users is an important process. (Executive leadership, contact center operations, and end users that interact with the technology.)
Assessment and Planning
Audit current voice infrastructure:
When looking to unify your voice solution, determine the current state of the infrastructure. This baseline provides a starting point for building a long-term roadmap.
Document regional requirements:
Geographic requirements may differ due to internal (e.g., differing technology stacks) or external (telecom regulations) forces. Understand what they are and how they can impact the approach.
Define quality metrics and SLAs:
What does success look like? Technical factors such as MOS score and business metrics, like answer rates, about voice performance are important to identify and track.
Migration Strategy
Map the migration:
Some migrations are straightforward. Others require a phased approach, such as by region or department. Align with your voice team to determine what makes sense for your situation.
Precise testing and validation procedures:
Whenever changing components of your voice solution, ensuring the solution will work is critical before going live. Work carefully with your vendor, who should be heavily guiding the process, to make this happen.
Comprehensive training and documentation:
Capture all relevant information on your new solution, update past or create new documents and ensure users understand what they need to know. Again, a leading vendor partner should help support this effort.
Ongoing Optimization
Proactive issue resolution:
The lowest impact outage is the one that never happens. Use scalable tools or services that allow you to rapidly respond to problems or stop them before they become real issues.
Regular performance monitoring:
Continuously monitor and report on key technical and business metrics to ensure trends stay constant or move in a positive direction.
Manage your number inventory:
With tens of thousands of numbers to manage across your enterprise and contact center, companies need to organize their numbers to ensure they are being used and report on that usage as needed. Structuring your inventory effectively allows you to ensure spending is being deployed effectively and, when needed, provides a starting point for large projects, such as porting.
Scalability
Ensure your solution can grow with your business
Emerging Technologies
Plan for AI integration and advanced analytics
Platform Evolution
Stay flexible as UCaaS and CCaaS platforms evolve
Geographic Expansion
Choose solutions that support your growth plans
