Summary Bullets:

• Recent enhancements to the 8×8 platform are intrinsic to a foundational pivot the company has taken.

• The pivot masks the true scope of capabilities 8×8 provides and risks confusing the market.

8×8 has been very busy recently with new rounds of enhancements to its platform that strengthen the customer experience. A sample of more noteworthy features includes: an AI assistant for composing chat messages; the ability for employees outside the contact center to engage with customers via digital channels; the introduction of JourneyIQ which gives businesses the capability to optimize the customer journey across all channels, departments, and touchpoints; and the announcement of AI Orchestrator which enables interaction between bots from different vendors and supports hand-offs between bots and human agents.

The introductions come as 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 agent-centric to including self-service, from reactive to proactive, from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented, and from generic to deeply personalized. 8×8 and rivals such as Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom have been rolling out a steady stream of capabilities to help organizations make the transition.

The new features from 8×8 are intrinsic to a foundational pivot the company has undertaken. 8×8 has shifted from a company with communication and collaboration at its core to one with customer experience making up its central identity. Concurrently, 8×8’s ‘XCaaS’ platform has been renamed to ‘8×8 Platform for Customer Experience (CX)’. Given the importance of customer experience in the market, both the pivot and the new name make sense.

However, the change in direction comes with a cost. Whether called XCaaS or 8×8 Platform for Customer Experience (CX), it houses the same trio of unified communication, customer experience, and CPaaS capabilities. The new platform label along with 8×8’s metamorphosis into a customer experience company could lead some in the market to believe that 8×8 is now solely focused on customer experience. The positioning that 8×8 took so long to build – as a provider of integrated unified communication, customer experience, and CPaaS – is at risk of getting lost.

In an ideal world, 8×8 would simply reverse course and return to the land of ‘XCaaS’. But that is of course unrealistic given the complexities of a rebranding and repositioning of the size 8×8 has executed. Instead, 8×8 needs to communicate loud and clear – and repeatedly – that in addition to customer experience, it still provides unified communication and CPaaS and delivers those features in an integrated package. The sooner, the better.