Recently, 8x8 introduced 8x8 Engage to empower teams beyond the contact center with a robust, out-of-the-box solution designed to deliver exceptional customer experience (CX), drive satisfaction, and increase loyalty.

8x8 Engage incorporates native and third-party data, cutting-edge AI solutions, and platform-level contact center components to enable professionals across an organization to make the most of every customer interaction.

Take a look here:

Business leaders agree CX should be an organization-wide responsibility

According to recent 8x8 research, 92% of contact center and IT leaders agree that it’s a priority for their organization to deliver a consistent customer experience across departments, with 64% saying that between 20% and up to 60% of their organization’s customer interactions take place outside of the contact center.

Yet currently, just 6% of the business leaders surveyed say their organization’s customer experience is very consistent across the organization. Solutions such as 8x8 Engage serve to rectify that.

Industry analysts weigh in on Engage

Industry analysts attending the 2024 8x8 Analyst Summit were the first to be informed about 8x8 Engage. Here’s a sampling of what they’ve said to date about the product offering:

Liz Miller, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, posted in her tweets at the 8x8 Analyst Summit:

“Now...you guys know by now that I spend a good part of my day kicking people to remind them that #CX is a STRATEGY...NOT A TECHNOLOGY. Sing it with me now: CX is an ENTERPRISE-WIDE TEAM SPORT. Thank you @8x8 I feel seen.

“Introducing 8x8 Engage. Some will call it a solution for the ‘informal contact center.’ Others will call it an understanding that customer experience is not the sole responsibility or domain of the contact center. And yes...I am the ‘others’ of which I speak.

“This should make old-school thinkers in communications nervous. This isn't about 8x8 crossing lanes. This is filling gaps across CX strategy, providing tools, and embracing ecosystem partnership. This right-sizes functional need with enterprise-wide strategy.”

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Craig Durr, Practice Lead for Workplace Collaboration at the Futurum Group, posted as a tweet at the 8x8 Analyst Summit, “I am new to the 8x8 story, but I like what I am seeing at #8x8AnalystSummit. “They are showing noteworthy progress from the shared highlights of last year's event to this one. One proof point: 8x8 Engage—a new offering that provides call center features to non-agent employees who still touch customers. 8x8 Engage bridges the gap between UC and CX, enables smart decisions with contextual customer data, and fits into workflows outside of the call center.”

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Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, wrote in a No Jitter post, “As customer experience becomes a way for companies to compete, they need tools that give contact center capabilities to non-contact center personnel. This offering is aimed at that business need. “One of the challenges of scaling up customer-facing operations is that many workers only need a partial agent interface…. 8x8’s customizable interface allows the organization to streamline workflows as it simplifies the interface for the worker.”

Read the full article: 8x8 Engage Product to Bring Contact Center Capabilities Outside the Contact Center.

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Dave Michels, Founder and Principal Analyst of TalkingPointz, wrote in his Monthly Insider Report, Volume 8, Issue 2: “This is a new productized offering of the informal contact center, or CC for non-agents. “8x8 has been talking about this for a while under the XCaaS (Experience Communications as a Service) banner. XCaaS acknowledged that meaningful customer interactions happen outside the contact center, and Engage fills those gaps. It gives non-agents more CX tools, such as recording and logging. CX is often incorrectly used interchangeably with CCaaS. More commonly, it refers to an expansion of contact center services. 8x8 improves CX by expanding UCaaS.”

Watch Dave and Zeus talk more about 8x8 and 8x8’s other recent product announcements starting at 7:40 in this Real Time Recorded Q124 Events episode.

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Blair Pleasant, President and Principal Analyst of COMMfusion, tweeted at the 8x8 Analyst Summit, “I'm loving 8x8's new Engage product and their focus on workers outside of the #cctr who need these tools. Identifying the users is the challenge—HR, benefits, travel, accts payable, etc.—all need this.”

In her BCStrategies post titled “A Tale of Three Conferences,” Blair notes, “8x8 introduced the term XCaaS a couple years ago, highlighting its unified platform for UC and contact center, but is now pivoting towards customer support and CX. During its analyst event, 8x8 introduced 8x8 Engage (currently in beta), aimed at informal contact centers and customer-facing employees outside of the contact center, offering features such as queuing, AI bots, quality monitoring, and more.

“I was especially thrilled to hear about 8x8 Engage and how 8x8 recognizes that customer experience is an organization-wide responsibility and is everyone’s job. I’ve been talking and writing about this for years, noting that workers in human resources, marketing, finance, and even engineering, as well as retail workers, nurses, and others, often engage with customers and need the right tools for routing, queueing, recording, reporting, analytics, quality management, and more.”

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Oru Mohiuddin, IDC Research Manager, in her IDC Market Note, 8x8 Poised for Success with Outcome-based Innovations and Customer-centric Marketing Focus, says, “Engage is a versatile solution suitable for different roles with purpose-built, out-of-the-box interfaces. It facilitates external communications for all customer-facing roles (and not specific to contact center agents) through its advanced queue management capabilities. It can also drive internal collaboration between front office and back office as well as includes AI features such as meeting summarization that are optimized for mobile experience.”

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Patrick Watson, Head of Research at Cavell Group, wrote in his research note titled, “What Happened at the 8x8 Analyst Summit 2024: 8x8 Continues Its GTM Transformation to Becoming a CCaaS Leader,” “The transition towards contact center and customer experience solutions as the prime communications market opportunity can be seen throughout the industry. Traditional unified communications (UC) revenue and margin streams are being squeezed and providers across developed communications markets are looking to CX solutions and services as a key delivery priority.

“8x8 has been the communications vendor most openly talking about this strategic refocusing. A unified communications market leader, 8x8 has always had a strong contact center capability with the latter in its range of X-series products. Now it sees itself very much as a CCaaS first company, leading with this proposition in the market. 8x8 Engage is an AI-enhanced solution designed specifically for those users outside of the contact center.

“The solution is designed to bring some of the capabilities that were once the preserve of agents to other personas within an organization who speak to customers first-hand. These could be retail store personnel, traveling frontline workers, or subject matter experts within a business. But really the solution is not restricted to any one persona. The only two criteria are that the user speaks to customers externally and is not a typical contact center agent.

“This is the key distinction between the solution and others out there in the market, it isn’t a ‘lite’ or ‘informal’ contact center solution; it is an entirely dedicated bridging solution for those that sit outside of the contact center but need to talk to customers.

The solution will bring a host of carefully selected features that will more greatly empower these non-agent personas to better service the customers they communicate with.”

Read the full writeup here.

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Denise Lund, Research Vice President at IDC, completes this curation with a LinkedIn post from the 8x8 Analyst Summit: “#8x8AnalystSummit reinforces #8x8’s vision to bridge the gap between #UCaaS and #CCaaS. #boom #progress”

Interested in learning more about the trend toward organization-wide customer experience responsibility? See the latest research in the CX Responsibility Beyond the Contact Center Report.

Want to read other industry analysts’ points of view on the 8x8 Analyst Summit? We recommend this roundup from J Arnold & Associates Principal Analyst, Jon Arnold.