Tim O’Reilly’s concept of government as a platform1 is even more relevant and important today. Although the pandemic has magnified the potential benefits of government as a platform, there is one component that enables it all—communications. Typically, communication topics have been approached by local councils as discrete projects to be done at the lowest possible cost. The result is a patchwork of technologies that are extremely expensive to administer and maintain with limited functionality, little to no ability to upgrade, and a frustrating lack of analytical insight. As local councils worked to keep staff and residents safe, overcoming the unexpected constraints of outdated communications became a primary focus.

Now local councils are moving on to the next challenge: putting in place capabilities and processes that support new workflows and the new ways of working and engaging constituents. To make that happen, it’s time to start approaching communications from an enterprise architecture/platform perspective as well.

The 8x8 X Series does exactly that, bringing voice, video, chat, contact centre, APIs, and advanced analytics together to enable new ways of working, increase local councils’ ability to adapt to change, and strengthen service delivery resilience.

A complex starting point.

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Through our work with local councils, we've found a museum of telephony technology consisting of ancient multi-site PBX networks patched together as a result of shifting priorities and investing in communications as discrete projects.

Does this typical picture of communication deployments look familiar? Unfortunately, it doesn’t enable local councils to deliver a successful digital transformation. What if you could reimagine communications from the ground up? Better yet, what if you could reimagine the cost structure created by this complexity from the ground up?

Where to start?

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You would start with supporting every way that modern workers need to communicate across an organisation—by video conferencing and meetings, by phone (especially mobile phone), by text or chat (including persistent rooms), and how you serve constituents through all of these different communication types in a contact centre environment.

And because you probably already have multiple solutions for each of these types of communications deployed across the organisation, you might start by consolidating all of these applications down to one for each type. Now, IT’s life is much easier.

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But having separate applications for each of these different communication types is not efficient. It’s also more costly. Staff end up having to use different apps depending on which mode of communications they need.

So let’s start with the 3 boxes on the left first as contact centre is a large topic to tackle by itself.

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The breakthrough 8x8 made was recognizing the need for meetings, voice and chat to be combined into a common unified communications, collaboration and video suite. This is manifested as 8x8 Work.

8x8 Work is a comprehensive unified communications suite in the form of a single application that integrates enterprise-grade softphones and mobile apps with visual voicemail, corporate directories, instant messaging, presence, and call recording—everything needed to communicate in the office, on the move or working remotely.

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These capabilities are combined with a stand-alone video meetings service called 8x8 Meet that is scalable, global, and—most importantly—secure.

As an integrated platform, it becomes possible to seamlessly and instantly escalate a chat to a phone call and a phone call to a video meeting with full collaboration and sharing capabilities.

Contact centre.

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For years, 8x8 has evangelised that contact centre should never be separate from the world of unified communications.

We felt so strongly about this that investments were made to integrate a complete omni-channel contact centre into the same platform. Corporate directories, presence and chat are common across the platform, so a contact centre agent can easily identify available subject matter experts and involve them in the call to accelerate first call resolutions. Full interactive routing, chat, e-mail, voicemail and social support with customisable reporting enable optimisation of the customer's engagement journey.

For organisations using Microsoft Teams, 8x8 Contact Centre for Microsoft Teams provides a full suite of omni-channel contact centre functionality integrated with Teams to simplify customer engagement workflows and ignite collaboration across your organisation.

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Communications Platform as a Service.

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A new approach to communications, called Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS), is a delivery model that allows organisations to add real-time communication capabilities (such as voice, video and messaging) to applications by using application program interfaces (APIs).

And just like the contact centre, this started in a world where it was on a completely different platform, and people were out there building little standalone widgets, like 2-factor authentication. People have tried to build more complex applications in these environments, like a full-blown contact centre, but found it too difficult to create everything from scratch.

8x8 has a different approach regarding where this capability should exist. You guessed it: it should be on the same platform. We’ve added a full layer of CPaaS APIs to our platform that enable programmable communications for SMS, chat apps, voice and even video—which has some really cool use cases for streaming video from unaffiliated mobile devices right into the contact centre.

Third-party Tools.

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What about third-party tools that your organisation is already relying on to deliver services?

The platform should include an interface for third-party tools and enable extraction of raw data from the platform into third-party analytics solutions, as well as provisioning, management and synchronization with other back office systems, like HR systems.

It’s also important to empower organisations that don’t have access to big data, BI, and third-party back-office analytics.

So, natural language processing, voice intelligence, machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities are *native* to the 8x8 communications platform.

Shared services.

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With all the internal and external communications running through this platform, you now have the ability to apply advanced analytics that drive operational efficiency while optimising organisation effectiveness. Here are a couple of real-world examples:

By using persistent chat rooms across the organisation, with one query you can identify not only where a specific topic is being discussed, but the three top experts in the organisation on that topic.

Because all of the external communications are captured, you can really start doing analytics around recommendations by providing the agents with real-time guidance to help them deliver faster resolutions. It’s possible because the platform is telling them what to do next in any interaction. And it is end-to-end interaction analytics, because you can now track engagements across the entire platform, and not just in the contact centre.

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Integrations.

With the open platform approach, you only have to support one integration across all of these different communication applications! Some businesses have also deployed Microsoft Teams as a common user-facing interface for collaboration globally. 8x8 provides native integration with Microsoft Teams to address this need. Essentially, the Teams clients and ecosystem can be used as the front-end user interface to this platform with the 8x8 Voice for Teams integration providing enterprise-grade telephony, analytics and reporting.

Platform services.

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Last but not least, and really where 8x8’s technology roots started: platform services.

Abstracting all of the complexity of interfacing with the public switched telephone network (PSTN), number management, number porting, and monitoring—we’ve extracted all of that into our cloud platform and given you simple tools that allow us to worry about that in our cloud, so you don’t have to.

The platform can be interfaced to more than 160 carriers around the world to provide a global footprint with dynamic communications, routing through 16 geographically redundant data centers and creating a global public cloud infrastructure enabling users around the world in more than 190 countries.

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That’s what reimagining communications looks like—it's not theoretical, it's ready for your organisation to begin using today. X Series is the only open, complete platform with every mode of communication available in one place—UCaaS, CCaaS, video, messaging, collaboration, presence and the underlying data. All of this platform software is native to and owned by 8x8, with open APIs that enable customisation and enhancements to 8x8’s complete out-of-the-box functionality, whether that customisation is done by 8x8 employees or our partners, there are no third-party relationships to worry about. One hand to shake. One app to use. Start with the services required today knowing it’s easy to add new capabilities with a simple extension to the platform.

Implementation.

With the experience of tens of thousands of deployments, 8x8 has developed a methodology that provides quick implementation while removing risk from the equation. Sefton Council is just one example. They needed a way to support remote work capabilities for their contact centre. It took just 10 days from start to finish to get their 8x8 Contact Centre up and running.

Conclusion

Although government as a platform may still be in early stages of development, an open communications platform is available today. The ability to bring together voice, video, chat, contact centre, APIs and advanced analytics on one platform empowers your team to drive cost improvement while providing staff with the tools they need to optimise service delivery.

Visit this page to learn more.

1. Tim O’Reilly, “Government as a Platform”, Innovations, Vol. 6, Issue. 1, Pages. 13–40, January 2011, https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/INOV_a_00056

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