Ariston USA heats up remote collaboration with 8x8

The Challenge: A struggle to make the slightest update

Ariston USA’s contact centers handle inquiries on behalf of tech support, customer service, and warranty teams. However, the organization was becoming increasingly frustrated with its Cisco communications system. “It was a struggle to make even the slightest update,” says Jason Alpert, Senior Warranty Manager for Water Heating at Ariston USA, “because we had to go to IT and they had to get their specialist involved. So, that was one of our driving forces to make a change.”

Alpert and team reached out to telecom solutions provider Livtech for assistance with finding a cloud-based contact center platform. Livtech presented the team with a few different options, including 8x8, RingCentral, and Vonage, and the team evaluated all three alongside their current Cisco implementation. In the end, they chose 8x8 for a couple of main reasons.

“We felt like we’d get a better feature package with 8x8,” says Alpert, “and also 8x8 was more cost-effective, particularly with regards to set up and onboarding services.” Unlike with Cisco, features like call recording were baked into the platform, and the team wanted to engage professional services to help them get up and running on the new system quickly.

The Solution: A single platform for internal and external teams

In May 2021, Ariston USA rolled out 8x8 Work and 8x8 Contact Center across its U.S.-based offices. The organization had already become used to working remotely during the pandemic, which made transitioning onto a cloud platform easier. Also, with 8x8, employees no longer had to connect to the VPN (and deal with bandwidth bottlenecks) to access the system. Alpert and team made sure they got plenty of educational resources to help with onboarding to 8x8.

“Overall, the process of migrating to 8x8 went well. Porting over the phone number of our main IVR went without a hitch, and we had less than an hour of downtime when we switched over,” recalls Alpert.

Since moving to 8x8, the team has also successfully transitioned to using 8x8 Agent Workspace. Alpert says, “The dashboard does a nice job of compacting everything and giving agents a quick way to see what their peers are doing in case they need to set up a call.” 8x8’s flexibility allowed them to run the old and new system in parallel for a time, so that employees had time to move over. The team is also using 8x8’s integration with Salesforce, which provides access to 8x8’s tools from within the Salesforce interface.

With the successful rollout in the U.S., Alpert and team are now looking to extend 8x8. Their third-party contact center based in Mexico is currently routing their 800 number calls through the old Cisco system. Some calls need to then be transferred to the U.S. team, which can cause lags, drops, and other issues.

Moving the Mexico team to 8x8 will help create a single solution for all North American contact center operations, aligning with the company’s goal to consolidate tools and operate more as one company. More importantly, customers will enjoy an improved service experience, and agents will be able to collaborate more easily between teams. Supervisors will also be able to use the same reporting and analytics tools across contact centers to drive greater transparency, quality, and performance.

The Results: Direct control, better hybrid support

Ariston USA contact center teams gained a number of benefits of switching from Cisco to 8x8. For example, the system’s ease of use enables Alpert to administer the system himself. He says, “With 8x8, we have a lot more direct control over the system; we don't have to translate our ideas to IT and wait for the updates. I can go in and make changes to things like scripts, queues, and users.”

Built-in features like call recording have allowed the team to improve operations without the price tag of adding it to their previous Cisco system. “It would have been several times the cost of our 8x8 implementation to add call recording to our Cisco system,” says Alpert.

8x8 also better supports Ariston’s hybrid workforce and multiple contact centers. “We’ve been able to hire agents in other parts of the country,” says Alpert. Not only can internal employees work from home seamlessly, but soon they will be able to do so with their colleagues in the external contact center across the border.