After an invigorating week at Enterprise Connect 2019 in Orlando, one thing is clear: Business communications is the battleground on which companies compete to survive as they modernize the way employees collaborate and serve customers. Our announcements focused on new capabilities and enhancements across our solution portfolio, including contact center AI and speech analytics, and video conferencing and collaboration.

The main themes that were discussed at the conference were team collaboration, artificial intelligence, the contact center and customer experience. Vik Verma discussed the future of communications and collaboration in the panel session titled “Communications & Collaboration: What’s the Way Forward?”. Here are a few highlights from the panel:

“As human beings, communications is core. Even if you embed it in different devices, you will always have a standalone communications platform because that is what we are geared towards.”

“It is evident that none of us are giving up our iPhone or Android-based phone just so we can do an embedded phone call in an e-commerce application.”

“Every voice, chat, and interaction globally sits on our platform to provide dashboards and machine learnings for improving efficiency. You cannot use that data outside of providing value to the customer.”

For the full-length panel session, watch below:

Across various other panel sessions, 8x8 executives and customers shared insights on collaboration and communications best practices. Thank you to our moderators Sheila McGee-Smith, Blair Pleasant, Melissa Swartz, Jim Burton, Robin Gareiss, Beth Schultz and Elka Popova.

8x8 Customers Sharing Best Practices at #EC19

At Enterprise Connect 2019, 8x8 customers participated in numerous panel sessions, sharing their experiences and insights with attendees. Here are a couple of highlights from the sessions:

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At the panel “User Adoption Success Stories and Best Practices,” 8x8 customer Ken Neimo from Laureate was asked for three tips for successful user adoption of transformative communications. This is what he shared:

  1. Involve the entire company.
  2. Have innovation champions who are part of the selection process.
  3. Have the people who know the business involved as an integral part of the change enablement process and localize the training and implementation across your global offices.
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8x8 customer Jim Bunch from HomeAway was on an interactive panel titled “Enterprise Case Studies: The Evolving Roles of CRM and Contact Center” and said this about his experience with 8x8:

“8x8 handles all the channels for us—they deal with all the carriers and the call quality. 8x8 will build it for you and manage it for you so you can do far more with less on the development side.”

Thank you to all of our 8x8 customers for participating as speakers at Enterprise Connect 2019. Besides Ken Neimo and Jim Bunch, customers included Dan Metzger from Conde Nast, Will Simons from Movement Mortgage and Matt Baker from Mold-Rite Plastics.

Communication & Collaboration Trends from #EC19

We recorded live interviews from #EC19 with 8x8 executives, customers and partners. Listen to the Communications. Transformed. podcast below via SoundCloud, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or your favorite podcast player. We covered topics such as cloud communications, artificial intelligence, team collaboration, migrating from a legacy PBX system to a modern cloud communications platform and the always-fun rapid-fire questions.

Experience the New Speed of Business

8x8 made several announcements leading up to and at Enterprise Connect around the theme of “experience the new speed of business.” They included new capabilities and enhancements to analytics across our product line, 8x8 Meetings and 8x8 Contact Center, including a new AI partnership with Google.

We had product demos showcasing how a business environment (whether in the office or remotely) can leverage 8x8 products.

The booth featured performances at the top of every hour demonstrating real-life scenarios of how our products are used by sales and support departments as well as by mobile workers. Select attendees and those staying at the Gaylord received our Google Cardboard VR kit, which let them hear and see our executives talk about 8x8’s products and services. We heard from you on Twitter that it was a good experience and we look forward to experimenting with virtual reality more in the future. If you weren’t at EC 2019 and want to experience our 360-virtual reality presentation, check out the video on YouTube.

Meet Poly

At the show, our partner Polycom announced a new name following its merger with Plantronics. Poly, which means “many,” leverages the legendary audio and video expertise of Plantronics and Polycom and their suite of smartphone and conferencing options that connect unified communications platforms to reduce the distractions, complexity and distance in the modern workspace. Poly aims to be the solution of choice whenever and wherever collaboration clouds reach people. 8x8 has been working with Poly for many years including our Flex hardware rental program for businesses of any size. If you attended EC 19, you might have been the lucky winner of a Poly headset via our daily giveaways in the “Claw.” Watch the video below for more information about Poly:

Above all, we want to thank all the attendees who stopped by the 8x8 booth to ask insightful questions about our products or to simply introduce themselves and their companies. Without you, we couldn’t build the next generation of cloud communication products.

See you at #EC20!

Try out the new 8x8 Meetings & 8x8 Contact Center Experience

Do you want to see a demo of the new 8x8 Meetings and 8x8 Contact Center? If you are an existing customer, reach out to your account manager to request a meeting or if you are new to 8x8, speak to one of our 8x8 solutions expert.