8×8, Inc.†(NYSE:EGHT), a leading provider of cloud phone, meeting, collaboration and contact center solutions, announced the general availability of†8×8 X Series, the next generation system of intelligent enterprise engagement for all customer and employee interactions. Now available in the U.S. and U.K., X Series helps companies radically transform enterprise communications with one cloud solution for voice, video conferencing, contact center, team messaging and collaboration across mobile and desktop devices.
“Business leaders recognize the criticality of staying at the forefront of customer service trends. They need to empower their entire organization to participate in customer care, which requires integrating contact center communications and collaboration capabilities with those of the broader enterprise,” said Rob Arnold, Principal Analyst of Information & Communication Technologies at Frost & Sullivan. “Organizations with integrated contact center and unified communications environments, like the 8×8 X Series, will reduce operational costs. They will gain differentiated business efficiencies and agility, ultimately leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.”
X Series has gained early adoption and success, particularly across mid-market and enterprise organizations, in a wide variety of industries including retail, healthcare, manufacturing, technology, and the public sector.
“As the largest restaurant franchise operator in the U.S. with more than 460 Applebee’s restaurants across 23 states, we needed to modernize our legacy communications infrastructure to address the rapidly evolving way in which today’s employees and consumers interact,” said Jeffery Kent, Senior Vice President of Information Technology at Flynn Restaurant Group. “8×8 is the ideal partner to help us move our communications to the cloud, both at speed and at scale. With X Series, we will finally have strong analytics and reporting capabilities across all locations to quickly identify trends and improve our employee and customer engagement.”
8×8 continues to expand its global footprint and recently completed a large-scale U.K. public sector deployment with the Brent, Lewisham Councils in London, and the Local Government Association. The X Series deployment replaced disparate on-premise solutions for 10,000 employees across 63 sites. “We always strive to deliver high-quality services to residents to make our boroughs the best places in London to live, work and learn, and we could only do that with a robust communications infrastructure. 8×8’s X Series meets our business needs and will help us not only improve customer experience for residents but also make it easier for staff to work remotely,” said Prodromos Sarigianis, Head of Digital Services at Brent, Lewisham & Southwark Councils Shared Service.
The new 8×8 X Series enables organizations to differentiate their customer experience by offering context-rich engagements, a single cloud platform for enterprise-wide collaboration, and advanced employee-customer interaction analytics capabilities. X Series uniquely transforms enterprise communications in the following ways:
- Enterprise-wide Team Collaboration to Speed Decision-making and Issue Resolution:†Companies now for the first time have an interoperable messaging system with X Series that helps global teams connect seamlessly across more than 26 team messaging solutions, including mainstream collaboration apps like Slack, Atlassian Stride, Google Hangouts, Cisco Webex Teams, and more. For example, Slack users can now chat with Hangouts or Stride users with the X Series team messaging solution. Teams can also easily turn a chat into a phone call, a video conference or an enterprise-wide collaboration tool to speed critical decision-making and issue resolution with the new X Series.
- Data Intelligence to Optimize Scarce Moments of Customer Engagement:†Customers value having issues resolved quickly, and many of them will not hesitate to take their business elsewhere if companies do not deliver. In fact, 82 percent of customers stopped doing business with a company after a bad experience (Source: Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends Report, 2017). X Series offers a 360-degree view of customer interactions, providing the most meaningful and relevant interaction history, such as recent voice, email, chat conversations and CRM activity records, prior to a service agent engaging with a customer. This is a paradigm shift from customers having to repeat themselves multiple times with a service agent, to being greeted by, “I know exactly how to help you.” With the new X Series, service agents are now armed with a single, unified view of the customer’s journey to deliver an exceptional experience.
- Predictive Analytics to Proactively Identify Opportunities and Issues that Influence Customer Satisfaction:†X Series enables companies to manage all of their customer data on a single integrated cloud platform which can then be powered by AI and machine learning to provide even more valuable business insights. With the new X Series,†company leaders will now make better business decisions by proactively identifying patterns in how customers are engaging. For example, a retail company can spot peaks in-store activity during certain hours of the day and increase their staffing accordingly to boost sales, or adjust their store hours to accommodate the shopping trends. The new X Series also offers detailed reporting and analytics on call quality, which tends to be a big priority for mid-market and enterprise companies.
“8×8 has been at the forefront of cloud communications, continuously innovating how companies engage with their employees and customers to deliver exceptional customer experiences,” said Dejan Deklich, Chief Product Officer, 8×8. “With X Series, we are redefining the $40 billion enterprise communications market by giving companies the ability to integrate all of their employee communications and contact center solutions on a single cloud platform. We are helping companies make the radical shift from using multiple dispersed solutions, to a single system of engagement optimized to deliver the best employee and customer experience.”
8×8 X Series is now available in the U.S. and U.K. with multiple plans tailored to meet different business needs, from basic cloud telephony to a completely integrated voice, video conferencing, contact center, team messaging and collaboration platform. Each X Series plan offers increasingly powerful engagement capabilities and builds on the previous with competitive pricing.
