The Transformation of 8×8: The Evolving Roadmap

The digital transformation of the communications landscape has created a new style of technology stack for today’s business leaders. The concepts of “one-size-fits-all” solutions and tools haphazardly strung together from different vendors are gradually disappearing.

We’re all on the hunt for technology that’s more scalable, agile, and flexible. Fortunately, many technology vendors are exploring new ways to make the cloud communications ecosystem more unified than ever before. Here at UC Advisor, we’re proud to work with some of these major market contenders, helping businesses from every industry consolidate, converge, and evolve.

One of the most innovative companies in our partner portfolio, is 8×8. This leading technology company has become a true pioneer in the concept of “everything as a service” in recent years, with the introduction of the “Experience Communications as a Service” or “XCaaS” platform.
Today, we’re taking a closer look at how 8×8 has become the foundation of a new future for unified internal and external communications.

The Transformation of 8×8: The Evolving Roadmap

The digital transformation of the communications landscape has created a new style of technology stack for today’s business leaders. The concepts of “one-size-fits-all” solutions and tools haphazardly strung together from different vendors are gradually disappearing.

We’re all on the hunt for technology that’s more scalable, agile, and flexible. Fortunately, many technology vendors are exploring new ways to make the cloud communications ecosystem more unified than ever before. Here at UC Advisor, we’re proud to work with some of these major market contenders, helping businesses from every industry consolidate, converge, and evolve.

One of the most innovative companies in our partner portfolio, is 8×8. This leading technology company has become a true pioneer in the concept of “everything as a service” in recent years, with the introduction of the “Experience Communications as a Service” or “XCaaS” platform.

Today, we’re taking a closer look at how 8×8 has become the foundation of a new future for unified internal and external communications.

About 8×8: The Flexible Approach to Technology

Leading communications company, 8×8, has come a long way since it was first founded in 1987.

From day one, the company wanted to set itself apart as a forward-thinker in the communications space, providing new, more efficient, and scalable ways to bring teams together, and power customer service. When 8×8 started it’s journey into the communications space in the year 2000, it was one of the top VoIP service providers in the world.

Over time, the company discovered new ways to go beyond the basics of digital voice, integrating video, chat, contact center, and enterprise-class API solutions into a single global service. Essentially, 8×8 is converging the worlds of CPaaS, CCaaS, and UCaaS.

Aside from its commitment to innovation, there are a few things that set 8×8 apart from its competitors in the communications space:
• Service: 8×8 offers expertise, service, and support to businesses from every industry. It offers solutions for marketing and demand generation, Microsoft Teams integration, collaboration and mobility, business continuity planning, cloud migration and more.
• Security: Committed to protecting the crucial assets of growing businesses, 8×8 protects businesses using the highest levels of data security and privacy standards, verified by third-party security and compliance certifications.
• Flexibility: Avoiding the one-size-fits-all trend, 8×8 provides a complete platform where companies can unify business phone, chat, video conferencing, contact center solutions and APIs, to keep every organization resilient, and future-ready.
• Reliability: The patented technology and platform offered by 8×8 delivers consistent end-user experiences, and reduces the risk of inconsistent networks. The team provides an end-to-end SLA that covers not just uptime, but also call quality.
• Insight: 8×8 gives companies behind-the-scenes insights into their most important data. From call activity reporting to AI-driven speech recognition, 8×8 makes it easy to analyze information from throughout your touchpoints, for consistent productivity improvements, revenue growth, and cost savings.

All of these factors, combined with 8×8’s unique approach to flexible and transformative technology, has helped the company to earn some fantastic accolades. In fact, 8×8 has been named a leader in the Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant for 11 years in a row.

8×8: The eXperience Communications Platform

8×8 takes a unique approach to unified communications and contact centre technology, by providing businesses with a modular, all-in-one solution for technology. The heart of the 8×8 offering is the 8×8 eXperience Communications platform. This all-in-one toolkit combines business phone technology, with contact centre, video conferencing, team chat, and APIs.

Business Phone

8×8’s business phone technologies allow companies to leverage cloud PBX solutions to onboard team members and align collaboration in any part of the world. The solution provides an all-in-one toolkit, available on a browser, or within a single app environment.

Features range from voice and video meetings, to private messaging and team chat. There’s also 8×8 Work, the all-in-one collaboration tool designed to help every company unlock endless levels of productivity. 8×8’s full business phone solutions include unlimited calling fax, and SMS, multi-level auto attendants, call recording, visual voice mail, caller ID, ring groups and more.

Plus, there are built-in UC analytics, conversion IQ insights, role-based access controls, and useful apps for teams to access on any device.

Contact Center

8×8’s ever-evolving contact center solution provides a complete cloud-based customer experience toolkit, making it easier for agents to collaborate and ensure customer success. The platform comes with adaptive analytics, allowing businesses to activate agent potential with intelligent coaching, timely feedback, and valuable AI-driven tools.

The platform comes with an intelligent customer assist solution, which allows customers to actively self-service without agent involvement. Plus, 8×8 supports omnichannel routing across a range of digital channels, as well as giving team members a fantastic agent workspace for useful insights.

The complete 8×8 contact centre toolkit also offers a variety of useful analytics and reporting tools, with automatic notifications to highlight critical performance metrics. There’s even embedded workforce management, for scheduling and organizing contact center workflows.

Video Conferencing and Team Chat

8×8’s eXperience communications platform is designed to improve both customer and employee experiences at the same time. This means providing back-end employees with all the tools they need to collaborate, and connect on different platforms.

The video conferencing features baked into the system allow for high-definition video conferencing for up to 500 participants (completely secure and encrypted). Plus, there are tools for rich content sharing and presentations built-in. Participants can create virtual backgrounds, access their tools on mobile, and even use advanced moderation controls.

8×8’s business chat is another fantastic solution for collaboration and team work. The unified chat experience works across mobile and desktop, with users added directly from a company directory. Users can launch a call from a chat thread, start team conversations, and share files. Plus, you can access the chat tools while you’re active in a video meeting.

Communication APIs

As well as navigating the CCaaS and UCaaS worlds, 8×8 has also made an investment into becoming one of the top solutions for CPaaS customers. Communication Platforms as a Service solutions like communication APIs allow companies to embed real-time communications technologies into their existing workflows and technologies.

The APIs make it quick and simple to implement various forms of communication into your business stack. There are options available for:
• SMS: To reach customers with notifications, one-time passwords, alerts, and reminders.
• Voice: Call masking, interactive app-to-app calls, text-to-speech and more.
• Chat apps: Programmatically send rich messages and content to users through chat.
• Video: Enhance customer experience by bringing video to your mobile apps or websites.

The 8×8 Connect service also provides access to a multi-channel communications management solution for all of the top 8×8 APIs. Plus, the company also offers “Jitsi as a Service”, an enterprise-ready embeddable video solution that helps businesses to white label and deploy video tools.

The Latest Evolutions to the 8×8 Platform

In the last couple of years, 8×8 has consistently updated and enhanced its communications solutions and services to address a variety of changing business needs. Recently, the contact center and customer experience sections of the platform received some major updates.
In 2023, 8×8 introduced its new Intelligent Customer Assistant, a user-friendly conversational AI service that enables businesses to create automated self-service and support solutions across channels. The solution can boost first-contact resolution rates, and reduce agent workloads. Plus, you can access personalized customer interactions with built-in integrations.

8×8 also introduced a new agent workspace dashboard, giving users a comprehensive view of agents and queues at a glance. The team also showcased a variety of new integrations for the contact centre ecosystem in recent months, such as the 8×8 contact centre for Microsoft Dynamics 365, and a native integration for Salesforce Sales Engagement.

In the Unified Communications space, 8×8 upgraded its business communications tools with a new audit history solution in its admin console. This allows users to access historical configuration details for absolute audit visibility. The brand also certified a range of phones and accessories from leading providers like Poly, EPOS, and Yealink, and made upgrades to its mobile admin system.

8×8 is also constantly working on making its platform more user-friendly, with new themes and experiences for app users, and even a customizable sound library.

8×8 has even worked on upgrading its support resources for its customers, creating a variety of webinars and events, resource kits, and training tools to assist businesses in making the most of their new technologies. They are even product training videos available on the 8×8 website.

The Future of 8×8’s Communication Tools

For years now, 8×8 has been challenging how companies think about their communication stack. The company’s versatile and flexible tools are designed to appeal to a huge range of different businesses, from virtually any industry. With the 8×8 eXperience platform, business leaders can finally combine all of their API, UCaaS, and CCaaS needs into one toolkit.

What’s more, the whole solution comes with access to real-time organization-wide reporting, recording, coaching, and AI-powered analytics, and automation workflows. As an added bonus, 8×8’s exceptional approach to service continues to set them apart from the competition.

Not only does the company serve more than 35 cloud regions, and offer a 99.999% platform-wide up-time SLA, but it promises one governance, security, and data privacy model for absolute peace of mind, and 24/7 expert technical support.

If you’re looking for a flexible approach to communications, collaboration, and customer service, 8×8 could be the perfect solution for you.

Check out our Comparison Matrix for help deciding if 8×8 is the right vendor for your needs, or reach out to us for financial help from our Transformation Grant.