Over the past two years, contact centers have undergone an incredible transformation, accelerated by the move from 69% of agents working in a physical office setting in 2020 to 64% working remotely in 2021, according to 8x8’s State of the Contact Center Report.

With the expectation of a permanent hybrid work environment and a growing focus not just on customer experience (CX) but also employee experience (EX), contact center and IT leaders are now broadening their tech strategy and looking at contact center solutions built on platforms that can best support and optimize agent-to-agent, agent-to-customer, and agent-to-employee communications for the long term. This eliminates informational and organizational silos and fosters communication and collaboration in a way that helps agents quickly and successfully resolve customer issues. No longer is the contact center an island to itself. It now operates as a key component of the entire customer experience and organization, scaling and adapting more easily to meet increased customer demand and agent and location expansion, delivering improved visibility through reporting, and the sharing of key insights through advanced reporting and analytics — all while reducing overall IT, license fee and telecom minute spend and investment. Notes Forrester Consulting, this cloud platform approach delivers the “communications and technology needed to enable customer service and revenue, not block and limit them.” And solutions such as the 8x8 Contact Center, built on the 8x8 eXperience Communications Platform, are able to do all this with a highly-available platform that also delivers the security and reliability needed to support the stringent and unique requirements of an operate-from-anywhere workforce model.

“Without 8x8, I wouldn’t have been able to run a contact center remotely for more than a year.”

What impact does this deliver for organizations that adopt a fully integrated, single platform EX/CX solution? Let me tell you; it’s significant. 8x8 recently commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study to examine the potential return on investment (ROI) that enterprises may realize by deploying 8x8 Contact Center. For this study, they interviewed a current global customer that — like many organizations today — was operating with multiple outdated and fragmented technology providers. They needed a long-term, strategic technology partner who could eliminate costly downtime and become a true partner in their effort to not only quickly deploy work-from-home agents amidst the Covid-19 crisis, but sustain the model for the long term. Here’s what the study found….

8x8 delivers a 158% Return on Investment (ROI)

A triple-digit ROI — I mean come on, you had us at hello, but there’s a whole lot of extra goodness that goes into this overall return on investment. Here are just a few of the additional findings from Forrester Consulting’s study.

Quantified benefits include a $52M+ increase in revenue

This increase in annual contact center revenue over three years was delivered from an improved customer service answer rate that was “30% at best” before implementing 8x8 Contact Center and 90% post-deployment. The organization also witnessed cost savings to the tune of $1M in telecom minute usage costs and $5M in contact center license fees over three years.

Unquantified benefits include deployment in 7 weeks

Forrester Consulting’s interview also revealed that 8x8 was able to deploy 200 agent positions and 736 sites in less time than the customer had anticipated, while also responding to the request for additional agent positions, the opening of a new offshore contact center location, and increased work-from-home demands and requirements. In addition, they noted to Forrester Consulting that in 8x8, they received not just another vendor, but a technology partner that always acts quickly and with their best interest in mind to support their needs. More than that, 8x8 eliminated their previous, highly disruptive, downtime issues with its 99.999% platform-wide uptime SLA. Plus, the 8x8 eXperience Communications platform allowed them to break down communication silos so that the “contact center was no longer operating as an island” and could easily communicate across the entire enterprise to resolve customer issues. That’s a win, win, WIN, my friends!

“I think of 8x8 as a partner, not a supplier.”

But wait, there’s more

As a final note, it’s important to understand that Forrester Consulting conducts its Total Economic Impact studies in a highly disciplined manner. An enormous amount of due diligence and validation of the findings are required. It’s impossible for us to encapsulate and share all of the findings in this blog post. So we encourage you to read the full Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study here.