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Merry Christmas and/or Happy Hannukah from Continuant!
The end of the year marks the beginning of a season where some of the most important holidays are celebrated all over the world. It’s quite a big undertaking for most people, setting up festive decorations, coordinating with family and friends for holiday celebrations, and getting the right food and gifts.
And if Clark Griswold has taught us anything, it’s that it rarely ever all goes to plan. 
The same is true in business communications. There are so many moving parts that go into creating the ideal communications environment, especially for organizations looking to create a hybrid workspace.
When it’s time for the holidays, it gets even trickier. People travel, take holiday leave, or perhaps comes back to the office to take part in workplace festivities. A hybrid communication environment can effectively facilitate this, and Continuant makes an ideal partner for building one.
As wonderful as our holidays are, they come with plenty of their own elements of chaos. Christmas family gatherings, dinners, church services, and parties, even the most fun ones, are tough to plan. As for Hannukah, let’s just say many families have more than just eight crazy nights.
Most of all, this is a time of excessive gift shopping. Certain organizations, especially in retail, are going to experience peak business activity right around this time. Maintaining collaboration between employees, and especially with customers, is of the utmost importance.
Customers aren’t going to accept lulls in communications. Even if they’re not quite as frantic as a mom with a missing son, they need you to be ready to meet their needs in time for the holidays.
Unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and contact centers as a service (CCaaS) are the gifts that every organization needs to build a hybrid environment that can survive the holiday rush.
UCaaS solutions like Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, and Zoom facilitate collaboration between coworkers both in office and remote. As long as they’ve got an internet connection, you can seamlessly connect with Santa's workshop from your corporate office in Cincinnati or your colleague's home in Plano, Texas. 
CCaaS from providers like Genesys and Continuant helps your customer service agents communicate with customers through every channel. Chatbots and other AI integrations can handle many lower priority customer issues, freeing up the agents to handle more pressing concerns, like mass regifts on boxing day.
With tools like Teams and the Continuant Connect Contact Center (C4), the headaches of holiday chaos can be significantly reduced. On top of that, they can be used in unique ways to make the holidays a more engaging and enjoyable experience for everyone involved.
UCaaS and CCaaS tools make workplace collaboration, and therefore everyone’s jobs, so much easier. That doesn’t mean it’s all work work work. Modern collaboration platforms have special ways to spice up the holiday season.
Advanced video collaboration makes it easier for remote employees to participate in big Christmas parties or holiday gatherings. It may not be quite the same as attending in person, but it’s a whole lot better than nothing.
These platforms can also enable virtual activities that can get coworkers more engaged with the festivities. This could include holiday trivia game sessions, Christmas movie viewing parties, or even a virtual gift exchange.
With omnichannel contact centers, there are even ways you can get your customers involved. Festive messages and other forms of holiday content can be delivered to willing participants through their preferred channels. Couple this with automation features, and the pain of Christmas cards really goes away.
Modern communication tools make the holidays that much brighter, not to mention easier, but it doesn’t stop there. Once the clock strikes midnight on the new year and the day of Epiphany has come and gone, UCaaS and CCaaS solutions remain, continuing to provide benefits through ordinary time.
Continuant’s got products that cover both. For UCaaS, we have Continuant Connect, which offers an easy-to-use, all-in-one platform for your disparate collaboration apps. This includes Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Zoom, and even Avaya Aura.
For CCaaS, we offer C4, which provides all the features of an omnichannel contact center with high level support and user adoption services from Continuant. It also integrates seamlessly with a plethora of UC platforms, especially through Continuant Connect.
Schedule a meeting with us to learn more about Continuant Connect and C4 and determine how our solutions can give you the hybrid workspace you need.
And although it’s been said many times, many ways, Merry... uh, I mean, happy hybrid holidays to you!
