8×8 Announces Experience Communications as a Service

8×8, an integrated cloud communications platform provider, has announced Experience Communications as a Service (XCaaS), a cloud communications deployment model that erases the boundary between Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS).

With XCaaS, organizations can support the communications requirements of all employees as they work together to deliver differentiated customer experiences.

Addressing a large community of UCaaS, CCaaS and technology analysts at the 8×8 Analyst Summit, 8×8 CEO Dave Sipes commented,

“As in other markets, such as CRM and ERP, when organizations transitioned from legacy, on-premises systems to SaaS and cloud deployment models, fragmentation occurred, resulting in multiple disparate solutions across the enterprise.

“XCaaS eliminates communications silos, brings the employee experience and customer experience back together, and helps drive the cloud communications industry forward significantly.”

IT, CX and line of business leaders are challenged in their ability to deliver effective solutions for an evolving and increasingly complex work environment. Obtaining a 360-degree view of both employees and customers is critical for overall organizational effectiveness and long-term business success.

According to Metrigy, companies find success when they integrate their contact centre with unified communications.

Those using an integrated cloud unified communications and contact centre solution from a single vendor reported nearly 100 percent revenue improvement, a 14 percent cost decrease, a 57 percent customer experience rating improvement and a 37 percent agent efficiency improvement.

8×8 XCaaS delivers a single platform for both employee and customer experience, which includes fully integrated, cloud native contact centre, voice, team chat, meetings and Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) capabilities.

Built on a resilient, secure and compliant cloud platform, 8×8 offers the highest levels of reliability, and is backed by the industry’s only UCaaS and CCaaS platform-wide 99.99 percent uptime SLA.

“8×8’s integrated cloud communications and contact centre platform provides us the flexibility and resilience to quickly manage all employee and customer interactions from any location or device,” said Brian Himstedt, Sr. Director of Technology at The Kansas City Royals.

“With XCaaS, it’s not just the operational value when it comes to the platform. It’s the data insights and the ability to make those insights readily available across the organization that help us provide a better customer and fan experience.”

8×8 XCaaS addresses today’s dynamic, critical workplace requirements by offering:

• High Availability Platform: ensures consistent, global service delivery across all employee and customer communications backed by a platform-wide SLA. Delivers the highest levels of security, privacy, compliance and data residency adherence through a single framework and policy.
• Company-Wide Collaboration: offers one organization-wide directory with shared real-time presence and seamless contextual transfers between voice, video and chat interactions.
• Unified Administration: provides a single provisioning and configuration console for all employee communications along with single pane system-wide monitoring and reporting and mix and match user types.
• Shared Integrations: delivers a single integration framework across contact centre and cloud communications for more than 50 third-party apps, including Microsoft Teams, to simplify the technology footprint and extend it to new use cases and workflows.
• Cross-Platform Analytics: provides relatable, cross-platform data sets that deliver real-time insights from every interaction, as well as more powerful AI and machine learning and a complete view of customer journeys across the organization. Managers and supervisors are able to provide real-time feedback using advanced natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and AI.

“This past year has highlighted that the siloed, inflexible communications bundles of the past will not be sufficient for the future of work.

“8×8’s open cloud platform with a full complement of integrated, modular capabilities allows us to deliver a highly differentiated solution to the market that advances the communications, collaboration and engagement needs of our customers,” said Andrew Halliwell, Product Director, Virgin Media Business.