Summary Bullets:

• 8×8’s latest capabilities reflect an ongoing pivot from collaboration occupying its core to customer experience (CX) assuming its central identity.

• While 8×8 is generating market momentum with the new capabilities, the offer structure is confusing.

A few years ago, 8×8 undertook a fundamental pivot, shifting from a company with communication and collaboration at its core to one with CX making up its central identity. Concurrently, 8×8’s ‘XCaaS’ platform – housing an integrated mix of unified communication, customer experience, and CPaaS capabilities – is now known as the 8×8 Platform for CX.

Given the importance of CX in the market, both the pivot and the new name make sense. Organizations are under intense pressure from customers to forge deeper connections. To meet that demand, contact centers have been undergoing a profound transformation, with the concept of a ‘contact center’ yielding to the broader concept of ‘customer experience’. Contact centers are converting from featuring live agents to also including AI agents, from reactive to proactive, from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented, and from generic to deeply personalized.

To help organizations make the transition, 8×8 and rivals such as Cisco, RingCentral, and Zoom have been rolling out a steady stream of capabilities. Just during March and February alone, 8×8 has been very busy launching multiple CX enhancements that are intrinsic to its makeover.

A sample of more noteworthy features illustrates how aggressively 8×8 has been fortifying its CX capabilities. The 8×8 Platform for CX is a good starting point with several introductions falling under that umbrella. The integration of Salesforce Customer 360 into ‘8×8 Agent Workspace’ helps agents provide more personalized CX; ‘8×8 Workforce Management’, which helps supervisors with forecasting, scheduling, and shift management, is now available with every contact center pricing package; the introduction of ‘8×8 Smart Assist’ offers agents GenAI-driven capabilities such as real-time guidance, dynamic workflows, and intelligent automation. Outside 8×8 Platform for CX is 8×8 Engage, which brings customer experience functionality to mobile workers, now available to all channel partners and customers globally.

An important aspect underpinning the announcements is that, in addition to delivering customer experience tools to agents, 8×8 is making them accessible to customer-facing groups beyond service departments such as frontline teams. Vendors, including 8×8, are increasingly acknowledging that in theory, the mission of any organization is to serve its customers and, therefore, every employee has responsibility for customer satisfaction, whether directly customer-facing or not. In catering to workers both inside and outside the contact center, 8×8 is keeping pace with rivals while also expanding the universe to which it can sell its CX tools.

Counteracting the momentum 8×8 is creating for itself is the marketing of its CX portfolio. Offering a menu of modules provides customers flexibility in crafting a CX footprint tailored to their needs. However, the confusion created by such a piecemeal approach outweighs that benefit. What each component does and where one leaves off and another picks up is not clear without conducting a fair bit of investigation. Customers would be better served by 8×8 taking a more muted approach with a slightly smaller number of individual components.

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