What should you look for in a good business communications platform? That’s a very BIG question.

The short answer: It depends. It depends on what your customers and business demand.

Most digital transformation projects, CXO initiatives, and investments are now focused on delivering a five-star customer experience. This can include tackling issues critical to this success path, including improving employee productivity, and enabling cross-organization collaboration, while simultaneously managing rapidly-changing demands due to customer trends, competitor activity, customer and employee expectations, individual and generational preferences, and other unforeseen factors. So the more flexible and robust your communications, the easier it is to respond to any business challenges that come your way. That said, if you’re reading this article then there’s a good chance you’re evaluating a move from a PBX solution to a cloud-based platform.

But don’t just move it—transform it. With the right cloud solution, you can deliver differentiated experiences with an integrated platform for customer and employee communications. By moving to the cloud, you can supercharge your organization’s customer experience (CX) with better, faster service and hardwire business continuity into every aspect of your communications while boosting employee productivity and satisfaction.

So where to start when considering customer experience and business success?

Instead of jumping to the first cloud solution you come across, it’s important to consider a few key factors. Ask yourself if the solution you are evaluating meets the follow criteria:

  • Reliable. In the real world, service level agreements (SLAs) are more than the sum of their parts, and organizations need to consider the reliability and resilience of cloud services to realize the full benefits. Simply put, downtime means lost business. Seek details around uptime SLA commitment and the backend architecture to deliver it. Is the SLA financially-backed? Even better. A financially-backed 99.999% platform-wide uptime SLA for UC and CC is the gold standard.
  • Integrated. A single-vendor, one-platform approach for internal collaboration and customer communications offers the best value and a streamlined end-to-end experience. With one integrated platform for customer and employee communications, businesses can respond to customer inquiries faster while maintaining the context and content of each engagement as it progresses through the customer journey.
  • But be careful: some unified communications and contact center solutions might be being positioned as “integrated” but typically have different data architectures and security frameworks, separate management and administration tools, and totally unrelated and unfamiliar user interfaces.
  • Trusted. Does the provider have a custom migration strategy with a track record of simultaneous UC and CC implementation that de-risks deployment and accelerates tech adoption?
  • Work with a vendor who is able to build a custom deployment, training, and support plan that prioritizes your current and future business needs. Leverage their technical expertise and business know-how to shape a better tech stack and future for your organization. Ask for and connect with customer references to learn from their experience first-hand. Engage with vendor resources that go beyond the sales cycle. After all, they will play a critical role in the success of this project.
  • Offering faster time to value. Total cost of ownership (TCO) goes far beyond volume discounts, licensing consolidation, and streamlined tech support. With every person in the organization playing a role in customer experience and success, look for areas of feature extensibility by making Quality Management, Speech Analytics, WEM tools, and Sentiment Analysis available to UC users. Also look for value and cost optimization in areas like mix-and-match licensing, simplified system management and maintenance, and global coverage to consolidate vendors worldwide.

True TCO discussions and calculations are fairly complex and require an in-depth, thorough understanding of current business operations and future plans. Leverage any resources that the vendor might have to help put together and justify a business case.

With communications systems forming the backbone of most business operations, using a less-than-perfect solution could mean overpaying, receiving less-than-acceptable performance, and not reaping the long-term success and benefits that an ideal solution could bring.

A top-notch UCaaS platform and vendor can positively answer these questions in-depth so you can select a solution that helps you deliver five-star customer and employee experiences, from the front desk to the back office.

The 8x8 eXperience Communications Platform advantage

8x8 brings customer and employee experience together with contact center, voice, video, chat, and APIs on one cloud-native platform. The 8x8 eXperience Communications Platform™ is the first and only true platform in the market and optimizes omnichannel customer experience with data-driven insights while enabling robust employee engagement in a work-from-anywhere world. Backed by industry-leading reliability with a 99.999% financially-backed uptime SLA for UCaaS and CCaaS.

Customers have benefited from faster time to value with our hardened, time-tested migration strategy, which enables simultaneous UC and CC deployment with a wide range of implementation options that best meet your business needs. With 8x8, organizations enjoy the benefits of a single solution and platform and a single point of accountability, contact, and support, which avoids finger-pointing and jumping from one vendor to another.

To help understand your current and future state, 8x8’s business value consultants are available to conduct an in-depth discovery process and analysis. Our consultants evaluate your current spending, projected 8x8 spend based on our understanding of your needs, and potential dollar and efficiency savings while providing insight into the cost of inaction, your break-even point, and the total cost of ownership. By understanding how you do business, your current objectives, and any limitations you face, the 8x8 team can ensure greater efficiencies and potentially lower costs.

Get the 8x8 UCaaS Buyers Guide now

As with any critical system transition, there are bound to be apprehensions about the process and concerns around not only finding the right-fit vendor, but also ensuring a successful rollout and continued long-term success. Download our UCaaS Buyers Guide which takes you through the key themes and concepts organizations should consider when selecting Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform.