Roberson and team evaluated three leading contact center and communications providers. The solution itself had to be user-friendly and transparent for everyone, allowing agents to get information quickly and easily. Out of the three, only 8x8 won out on both fronts. Roberson says, “All our agents could immediately launch 8x8 platform and understand how to use it, which was not the case with the others.”
What finally sealed the deal, however, was a glowing recommendation from one of their technology partners. “The CEO gave us rave reviews of 8x8,” says Roberson, “He had a deep understanding of our business, so with his recommendation on top of our demo experience, we went with the 8x8 Platform.”
“That was the easy part,” says Roberson. “8x8 Professional Services not only set us up, but also trained me on how to administer the system myself.” Roberson no longer had to call a third party agent to come in and make simple admin changes. Now, she can quickly respond to whatever is happening with the business. “8x8 deployment was great, the training was great—I couldn’t have asked for a better experience.”
In Cingo’s Dublin, Georgia office, call center agents are divided into two teams. A phone tree pushes home inspection related calls to the home inspection team, and the rest go to the general services team. In addition, one remote agent is dedicated to following up on sales leads.
The two teams also manage email and text messages from customers. With the previous solution, the call center had a scheduled rotation for monitoring a shared email account. Each agent had to remember to take a specific time out of their day to check the inbox for any customer inquiries. With 8x8 platform, email is now an automated channel that serves incoming email to each agent in turn, just like phone calls. “This is a much better experience for our agents,” says Roberson. “Everyone fields emails naturally, and no one has the added responsibility of monitoring an inbox.”
Since implementing 8x8 platform, Cingo’s communications have run like clockwork. The phone service works on every ring, and the call center team has been able to stay focused and productive. “It’s been a huge improvement to our operations,” says Roberson.
Some unexpected benefits have emerged as well. Previously, Cingo had been getting bombarded with telemarketing calls, which would tie up the agents and push actual customer calls to the overflow staffing agency, thus incurring extra costs. Their new phone tree on 8x8 Work has intentionally added a new hurdle for telemarketers, who have to press the keypad to get through to an agent. “Our overflow expenses have gone down dramatically,” says Roberson. “Now we can control costs better by filtering out telemarketers from our queue.”
Going forward, Roberson and team want to expand their use of 8x8 platform to reap more benefits for their operations and the business. They plan to use the analytics features to get greater transparency around the number of sales inquiries received and the number of new customers acquired. They may even consider moving their CRM to take advantage of 8x8’s integration with Salesforce. And there may be more to come. As Roberson says, “I’m an 8x8 fan—I like everything about our new system."
