Bringing Customer Obsession to Life with the 8x8 XCaaS Platform

Neha Chugh

June 27, 2023

Customer-obsessed organizations know that the most significant business asset is their customer base, and superior customer experience (CX), and customer satisfaction will drive measurable value both in the short and long run. Increasingly, the responsibility for delivering exceptional customer experiences is spread across an organization, with every employee playing a role in ensuring the best customer experience and guaranteeing overall success.

But with more and more customer interactions and engagement happening outside of the contact center, it is not surprising to find that one size does not fit all when it comes to communication tools.

For the third straight year, customer satisfaction has been ranked the top business priority—more important than product/service quality, revenue generation, information security, employee retention, and investor satisfaction. - Metrigy Customer Experience Transformation Study

The need: to solve for every X

Most digital transformation projects, C-level initiatives, and CX investments at companies are focused on building a solid technology foundation to first improve the employee experience (EX) to then deliver spectacular, five-star customer experiences. Equally important is making sure it's the right tech stack that offers companies the right data, at the right time, that can be shared and consumed across the organization.

Expectations around remote and hybrid work must also be managed. Today’s customers and employees communicate across the boundaries of geography, device, time, modes, and channels, and are increasingly dependent on digital interactions. And these digital and technology expectations will only increase as millennials and Gen Z encompass more and more of the employee and customer base.

With so many moving pieces, having a business communications system that brings a consolidated, 360-degree view of the customer is pivotal to enabling great experiences across the entire organization and building a competitive advantage. Personalization and contextual information are critical to this effort.

The answer: Experience Communications as a Service — or XCaaS

Here's the definition of XCaaS as introduced by 8x8: Experience Communications as a Service (XCaaS) is a cloud communications platform that erases the boundaries between Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS).

With our XCaaS platform, 8x8 is helping businesses enable cross-organization collaboration from the front desk to the back office to deliver differentiated, five-star customer experiences. Furthermore, the XCaaS platform enables us to uniquely deliver this via a highly reliable, one-vendor, single-platform approach with contact center, voice, video, chat, and APIs on a cloud-native platform.

Backed by a reliable and integrated enterprise communications platform, with pervasive data and insights across every interaction that can be reported, analyzed, and contextualized, companies can refine their CX strategy to deliver frictionless, memorable CX, regardless of where the customer or employee is in the world or what device they're using.

What does XCaaS mean for my organization?

Now that we have defined XCaaS, let's talk about its importance. It may not be a new concept or conversation, but it's certainly one that's risen to the boardroom level with a continued focus on customer and employee satisfaction and the spotlight on optimizing infrastructure investments and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and returns, all critical for ensuring business success and resilience.

With one integrated platform for business communications, organizations respond to customer inquiries faster while maintaining the context and content of each engagement as it progresses through the customer journey. Companies that get this aspect of customer experience right consistently outperform their peers on several critical dimensions, including customer loyalty and revenue. Creating better CX is the golden mantra for overall organizational effectiveness and a competitive edge.

With XCaaS enabling customer obsession across the organization, companies can deliver differentiated experiences while driving revenue, cutting costs, and optimizing operations for the new world of work.

According to Metrigy, successful companies are documenting impressive success when they integrate UC and contact center: Customer ratings improve by 26.5%. Operational costs drop by 18%. Revenue increases by 22.6%. Employee productivity improves by 23.1%

Winning with XCaaS

The Kansas City Royals are a great example of an organization benefiting from an integrated UC and CC solution.

Says their Sr. Director of Technology, Brian Himstedt, "8x8's integrated cloud communications and contact center platform provides us the flexibility and resilience to quickly manage all employee and customer interactions from any location or device. With the 8x8 XCaaS platform, it's not just the operational value when it comes to the platform; it's the data insights and the ability to which you can make those insights readily available across the organization to help us provide a better customer and fan experience."

Read the full story here.

Solving for every experience

Gartner refers to this "solve for every X" approach as total experience (TX) —bringing customer experience, employee experience, user experience, and multi-experience together—with a key goal being to share ownership of experiences in a way that improves consistency and reduces friction across both the employee and customer journey. And the analyst firm predicts that "by 2024, organizations providing a total experience will outperform competitors by 25% in satisfaction metrics for both CX and EX."

At 8x8, we're invested in our customers' success and their customers' success, and the innovation to ensure it continues. The 8x8 XCaaS platform solves what businesses need today and offers a clear and easy path to whatever is next.

Read what industry analysts have said about XCaaS:

-------------------