It’s that time of year again where we look at the results of the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) to help navigate the lay of the land. We’d like to thank Gartner for recognizing 8x8 alongside eight other vendors as some of the most well-regarded solutions around the globe for CCaaS technology.

This is now the ninth consecutive year that 8x8 has placed in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for CCaaS. This year, 8x8 was named a Niche Player.

I’d like to invite you to consider Niche in a different light—a solid option that provides the contact center essentials to advance your customer experience strategy.

You may wonder what I mean by “essentials.” I’m talking about the features that are core to your customer experience strategy. This includes the functionality that keeps your agents and supervisors engaged regardless of location; provides the necessary insights to take action; and offers integration flexibility to the degree that makes sense for your customer experience (CX) strategy. Many solutions add extra bells and whistles (props to them!), yet more often than not neglect taking some of the basics into account, including usability! We’re here to stand proud of the essentials, packaged in a user-friendly format, playing to what our customers actually need.

My overall takeaway from this year’s MQ is simple –– we are moving in the right direction according to Gartner given our improvements across 12 of their 13 Critical Capabilities. In the last 18 months, the delivery of Agent Workspace, Intelligent Customer Assistant, Supervisor Workspace, and enhancements to Interaction Analytics using Open AI Whisper, have all enhanced the usability and overall completeness of 8x8 Contact Center.

Let’s take a look at 8x8’s strengths highlighted by Gartner this year to further elucidate this point:

#1: Single platform for CCaaS, UCaaS, and CPaaS with strong Microsoft Teams integration

We pioneered the 8x8 Platform that enables organizations to deliver internal and external communications, with flexible integration options to further customize your CX operations, all from a single platform. It is through the power of these integrated solutions (and their data) that our solution delivers the ability to easily interact with customers, empower every employee across the business, and power true business agility.

Our 8x8 Platform delivery also makes it possible for our customers to take advantage of best-in-class AI/ML for another layer of customization or the ability to further tailor experiences to fit evolving customer needs. In essence, you can use BOTH proprietary AI and that of leading solutions to really have the ultimate freedom and flexibility in how you design and personalize customer experiences. This is the need we’ve heard time and time again from contact center and IT leaders, and we’ve answered that call.

#2: Global presence to effectively support contact center users across multiple regions

We’re thrilled that Gartner recognizes our strength in this area. Supporting contact centers that have global deployment needs and agents in multiple locations is core to our CCaaS strategy. Many of our contact center customers have cited our global voice quality, solution architecture, and patented Global Reach™ as reasons why they’ve selected 8x8. It’s why global BPO transcosmos entrusted 8x8 to power roughly 40 BPOs and 1,500 agents worldwide.

Matt Clarke, Chief Operations Officer at transcosmos, spoke on the experience of deploying 8x8: “As each contact center went live, 8x8 gave us all we needed in terms of IVR, live dashboards, wallboards, and historical reporting, plus some outstanding functionality. For the first time, our teams can now see every customer journey visually, map each interaction, link to specific calls, and manage surveys—which is key to delivering a great experience to callers on behalf of our clients.”

#3: Ease of use and intuitive designs for Agent and Supervisor experiences

Over the past few years, 8x8 has had a concerted effort in place where innovation starts with improving our UI/UX. This includes beginning with the end user in mind to create Workspaces that deliver options for every user / persona across the organization. Specifically in the contact center, the award-winning Agent Workspace and recently launched Supervisor Workspace are delighting our customers left and right. Check out the recent news on Supervisor Workspace to learn more about our customer's success.

The sole focus of our UX-led innovation team–– spread across four functions of content, insights, design, research––is to effectively understand how to build a solution to a diverse set of needs to improve productivity and overall engagement. We believe this is a unique approach to product innovation that we’re not seeing among any other CCaaS providers in the space.

Why customers choose 8x8

Customers continue to choose 8x8 over other providers because of the overall simplicity of our product while still offering the right set of (essential) features and functionality. In essence, we don’t force our customers to sacrifice on functionality simply due to the user-friendly nature of our solution. And to reiterate my earlier point, 8x8’s improvements across 12 of Gartner’s 13 Critical Capabilities serves as a major testament to our focus in delivering the right solution for our customer’s needs.

Contact center is critical to 8x8’s investment strategy and commitment to innovation. And it’s only getting better, so stay tuned!

Watch a demo, or read more about our strengths. Download a complimentary copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service.