OPW in Ireland Implements 8×8 XCaaS

8×8 has announced that the Office of Public Works (OPW) in Ireland has implemented 8×8 XCaaS (Experience Communications as a Service), an integrated contact centre, voice, video meetings, and chat solution, to enable its digital and technology strategy.

One of Ireland’s oldest government agencies, responsible for property management, heritage services, and flood risk management, OPW was challenged by disparate legacy telephony systems that could not meet the needs of its increasingly hybrid workforce.

With more than 2,500 staff members – including contingent, seasonal workers – located at 140 sites across the Republic of Ireland, OPW needed a modern cloud communications platform that was cost-effective and reliable, providing the organization the agility to allow staff to communicate and collaborate with customers, and each other, from anywhere, and on any device.

With 8×8 XCaaS, OPW is able to improve manageability and reliability, ensure organizational resilience, and enable an operate-from-anywhere workforce. 8×8 XCaaS is built on the 8×8 Experience Communications Platform, a reliable, secure, and compliant cloud platform that offers the highest levels of reliability with the industry’s only financially-backed, platform-wide 99.99 percent SLA across an integrated Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) solution.

Working with 8×8, OPW smoothly transitioned staff and communications capabilities to their new headquarters in Dublin, and across all of their sites, without losing connection with colleagues, partners and customers.

OPW’s commitment to being client focused, ensuring timely delivery of services, and providing value for money was made possible with 8×8’s integrated communications, collaboration, and customer engagement product.

The OPW deployment of 8×8 XCaaS further demonstrates 8×8’s continued growth within the public sector in Ireland and the UK:

• The number of UK public sector customers has nearly doubled year-over-year, ending March 31, 2021.
• 8×8 XCaaS is now deployed by more than a third of London’s boroughs.
• More than 20 NHS Trusts have deployed 8×8 XCaaS in the last 12 months.
• Additional public sector organizations who recently signed and deployed 8×8 XCaaS include:

• • Black Country Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust provides mental health, learning disability, and community healthcare services for four metropolitan boroughs. This UK public sector organization selected the 8×8 XCaaS solution to enhance the patient support and communication capabilities for more than 3,000 employees.
  • Sefton Council is the local authority providing essential community services for more than 270,000 residents in the Liverpool City Region. Following their original deployment of 8×8 CCaaS in 2020, the Council is now deploying services that include UCaaS and 8×8 Secure Pay for the full XCaaS solution, which allows Council employees to work freely from any location.
  • NHS Public Health Scotland, which provides support to the 14 regional NHS Health Boards, further expanded 8×8’s integrated CCaaS and UCaaS product to now support over 3,500 employees. Their communications needs were critical to managing vaccination helplines and booking services for Scotland’s COVID-19 response and 8×8 rapidly moved them to the cloud.

Liam Stewart, Head of ICT at Office of Public Works, said: “To continue effectively delivering services to our customers, we needed a different approach to enabling communications across our very distributed environment – one that provided collaboration and customer engagement tools, while also being easier to administer and maintain.

“8×8 provided us with exactly the solution we needed, including the capabilities to work remotely, on any device, and support both employee and customer communications – all easily administered from one, central console.

“We have a long track record providing valuable services in Ireland since 1831. However, with 8×8, we no longer have to rely on legacy systems and can move forward as an innovative and future-focused organization.”

“The need to transition from outdated technology in an effort to transform organizational performance and functionality is not new within the public sector, but it has never been more critical to meet new work requirements,” said Jamie Snaddon, Managing Director, EMEA at 8×8, Inc.

“OPW’s focus on customer engagement and providing exceptional services is the perfect use case for an integrated cloud communications and collaboration solution. With 8×8, OPW employees can work confidently knowing they are staying productive and connected with colleagues and customers.”