Recently, 8x8 introduced a cloud communications deployment model that erases the boundary between Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). At the launch, we defined the 8x8 platform and how it is relevant today. Since then, our sales teams have been having customer conversations daily about how the 8x8 platform helps organizations deliver modern communications experiences that drive revenue, cut costs and optimize operations for the new world of work.

In these conversations, we discuss why we believe that a purpose-built integrated communications platform offers customers more value than a UCaaS/CCaaS solution made up of multi-vendor bundles. This one-platform distinction separates 8x8 from the rest of the market and provides several benefits we call customer-value pillars. Five pillars stand out as mattering the most to our customers. They are agile, scalable, open, intelligent, and reliable. Here are a few thoughts on each.

Agile

If you asked this 18 months ago, it might have been said that business agility meant being able to move to a remote-work model nearly overnight. That is no longer enough. Today, agility means company-wide collaboration, role-based capabilities, and tailored employee experiences (EX) to improve how all employees work together. Businesses with highly engaged workforces are more profitable than those with poor engagement. But to create excellent EX, organizations need to give employees the right tools to help them do their best work. Keep in mind that customer experience (CX) is a team sport. Your communications platform must be nimble enough to allow you to personalize how you help your employees be more productive and deliver great CX. Companies that get CX right outperform their peers on several critical dimensions, including customer loyalty and revenue.

Scalable

Scalable, agility’s sibling, is about solving administrative challenges such as onboarding, updating user permissions, and performance management globally and in a unified fashion — no matter how fast or how big the business grows. No UC and CC silos give admins a single console option for platform-wide operations and monitoring, ease burdens on already stretched administrators, helping them complete IT management tasks faster than before.

Open

The 8x8 platform includes a single integration framework that supports more than 50 business app integrations including ServiceNow, Salesforce, and our popular Microsoft Teams integration for UC and CC, which by the way continues to grow significantly each month with thousands of new users being added. Our open attribute also amplifies agile and scalable features to cross-pollinate value. 8x8 Platform also supports open APIs to introduce CPaaS features and additional developer innovations to power business critical workflows spanning both CC and UC capabilities.

Intelligent

When data knows no boundaries, you can gain more insights, particularly when tracking a customer’s journey beginning with their first interaction. Cross-platform AI and analytics enable real-time organization-wide reporting. No more trying to mesh together CC and UC databases. Fully connected UC and CC means you can apply speech analytics to all customer communications. We know customers value these capabilities because they want to extract as much value from their data as possible and take advantage of emerging trends or gain customer sentiment insights.

Reliable

Naturally, uptime matters the most to any business. Unlike standalone solutions or bundled communication options, 8x8 supports platform-wide high availability 99.99% uptime SLA that is unmatched in the industry. Using patented technology and built-in software intelligence features including traffic optimization across global data center locations and policy consolidation, for example, 8x8 gives your UC and CC sites one standard policy for things like governance, security, data privacy, etc.

What’s Next

In a sense, these five value pillars underscore the 8x8 platform's direction because customers want the business agility to personalize the services they deliver and administer at scale and with reliability. So if you are considering investing in cloud communications, evaluate vendors based on these five pillars. They are the best criteria to help you achieve your business goals.

We will continue to update you about the 8x8 platform as it progresses.

Thank you to Frost & Sullivan for publishing research this week recognizing 8x8 for leadership around employee and customer experiences.