Experience Is the Only Advantage Left in Business Communications

I look at the field of business communication vendors, and I see a sea of sameness. The same feature sets, the same language, the same pitches. But there’s still a way to stand out: experience.

"I look at the field of business communication vendors, and I see a sea of sameness. The same feature sets, the same language, the same pitches."

Dhwani Soni

GVP, Product Management and Design

Great experiences are built on empathy and emotion. A great experience doesn’t need to have an “aha moment” to be a successful one, either.

As a product leader with a background in user experience and design, I’ve always looked at solving problems from a macro, design, and systems thinking approach. These products we create are part of a larger framework, for both end-users and our customers.

So when I consider how we build experiences, I keep in mind that technology touches so many aspects of our lives, and the onus is on us as product creators to understand that context. To remember that there are humans sitting behind the screens, with complex jobs, and complex lives.

Dieter Rams, legendary industrial designer, built this sensibility into the products he helped create. His core principles are relevant not just for couches and calculators, but also for tools in digital spaces. Good design is:

• Useful
• Simple
• Understandable
• Honest

The tools that people need to do their job (whether they like it or not) are going to impact their day, their week, and their month—no matter what.

We have the option of either building something that empowers people, delights them if we’re lucky, and ideally keeps them coming back time after time. Because that tool we’ve created makes them feel powerful. If we get it right, we turn them into the hero of their own workday.

"If we get it right, we turn them into the hero of their own workday."

Features Solve Tasks, but Experience Shapes Behavior.link to this section

A lot of time and energy go into thinking about what something does. Does it work? Does it turn x into y? But my sense is that we’ve gotten too distant from thinking about how the work feels.

A lot of the time, the industry gets things twisted. We think, oh, we’re going to create this perfect tool, and then people will learn to use it and love it. But we can't change people’s habits. We can’t change people at all, really! And we should stop trying. Period.

"We can't change people’s habits. We can’t change people at all, really! And we should stop trying. Period."

There’s a humility in acknowledging that people are busy enough that, believe it or not, they don't want to reorient their entire schedules just to fit around something that we've created.

Users will always remember friction. Don’t believe me? Read the (usually abysmal) reviews for electric utilities or internet providers. People don’t think about their power until it goes out, or their internet until it starts lagging. When things break or stall, emotions escalate, and single-star reviews come pouring in. Bad experiences drive churn; one in three customers will ditch a brand after a single bad interaction.

In an otherwise routine workday, a great experience creates momentum. Enabling that kind of frictionless slide through a to-do list is what drives both adoption and loyalty. A full 86% of customers are willing to pay extra for better experiences, and highly satisfied customers stay loyal up to six times longer.

People remember if a tool makes them feel smart and capable, but you better bet they’ll fixate on the ones that get in their way.

Cognitive Taxation Without Representationlink to this section

Have we just accepted that business communications, as a rule, must be hard?

We’ve normalized the fact that many vendors in this space have grown through multiple acquisitions, creating some Frankenstein’s-monster-like platforms. Lots of context switching, fragmented data, or repetitive workflows.

Users are asked to adapt to systems not designed for them. Frontline teams are expected to deliver empathy and speed while jumping across CRMs, knowledge bases, chat tools, analytics, and ticketing systems. After the conversation ends, the work continues: logging notes, updating records, and sharing knowledge.

Being thoughtful about experience is a way out of the cognitive rut users have been shoved into.

Building the Unifying Layerlink to this section

I’ve talked about what not to do. So let’s talk about what to do instead. A great experience:

• Makes complexity invisible
• Stitches together tasks into flows, unites fragmented touchpoints
• Connects people
• Removes cognitive load so people can get the job done (well)

I think a great test of a well-designed user experience is asking if people can imagine doing their job without it. If removing a tool simply means that it can be easily replaced with another product with similar functionality, then we haven’t done our job well. But if we create something that sands away a previously rough part of the workflow, then our diligence is rewarded with loyalty.

To use an example from my work here at 8x8, I saw that we were building for teams like billing and hiring, and all the usual suspects. And that was working really well. But then we looked at sales teams, and saw that we had a sort of blind spot for how certain teams preferred to work.

Picture this: there’s a salesperson, they’re in the field, they're on mobile, and they jump away from their company-approved business communication messaging tool because the customer wants to use WhatsApp.

And so there’s a crucial conversation happening, about their customer, about the competition. And it’s tucked away in a different tool. The moment that salesperson leaves, they walk out with all the competitive and customer information. Those key business insights…gone.

We were able to build that bridge, so all that valuable data doesn’t go missing the next time around. We built it so even the content of a single WhatsApp chat seamlessly feeds into a CRM and enriches every future conversation. We turned an area of loss into an opportunity.

Experience is More Than Wrapping Paperlink to this section

We have a responsibility as vendors. We aim to create unified, intelligent environments where communication, data, and insight work together seamlessly.

To do so, we could just copy-paste a UI and deliver the same thing over and over. Or we can step back and look at how a change in perspective can create something that is a pleasure to use every day.

We can build things a little more intentionally. A well-designed experience can add a flair that is unique to every vendor. Look at what Dieter Rams did at Braun; his aesthetic is instantly recognizable, even decades later. Timeless. How we make tools adapt to their users is our advantage.

That’s an advantage that lasts.

Dhwani Soni

GVP, Product Management and Design, 8x8

Dhwani Soni is Global Vice President of Product Management and Design at 8x8, leading portfolio strategy across UCaaS, CCaaS, CX, analytics, and AI. She builds AI-enabled platforms customers trust by balancing speed, reliability, and governance, and partners with executive leadership on prioritization and roadmap trade-offs to scale outcomes.