Kingspan Water & Energy found its right-fit solution with 8x8 Engage

Overview: Kingspan Water & Energy, a global leader in energy solutions, faced challenges with its fragmented and outdated communication infrastructure. With operations across multiple countries, the company required a modern, cloud-based solution to standardize communications, enhance remote work capabilities, and reduce costs. By transitioning to 8x8 Engage, Kingspan found the right-fit solution for its operations, streamlining communications, improving customer service, and helping the organization to meet its goals.

"We’re not a traditional contact center, so we went looking for something that made sense for our needs. 8x8 Engage comes at a great price point, and it’s a perfect option for us because it gives us the functionality that we need."

Richard Gray, IT Manager, Kingspan Water & Energy

Efficiency drained by outdated systemslink to this section

Kingspan Water & Energy, headquartered in Northern Ireland, is a global leader in environmental solutions for high-performance buildings and infrastructure. The company manufactures a range of products, including advanced water management systems, oil and agricultural storage solutions, among others.

Richard Gray, IT Manager at Kingspan, has been with the company for over 25 years. “My background is very technical and IT-based, but these days I’m much more involved in applications and application support. And I’m the go-to person for communications here,” says Richard. And as the go-to person for communications technology, he faced a growing challenge: Kingspan’s fragmented communications systems were no longer sustainable.

Before transitioning to 8x8, Kingspan faced several challenges with its communication infrastructure, which was a mix of on-premises PBXs and Skype for Business. The on-premises infrastructure required frequent maintenance, leading to high operational costs. Moreover, the system was ill-equipped to support remote work arrangements effectively and lacked advanced analytics, hindering its ability to optimize contact center operations and enhance service efficiency. This patchwork of outdated infrastructure created inefficiencies, made remote work difficult, and drove up maintenance costs.

Kingspan needed a cloud-based platform that could standardize communications across multiple regions, reduce costs while maintaining service quality, support remote and hybrid work environments, and provide valuable data insights to improve customer interactions.

More flexibility, more great toolslink to this section

When 8x8 Engage first launched, 8x8’s new purpose-built solution for empowering teams outside of the contact center with personalized customer interactions and seamless collaboration, Richard and his team took an immediate interest. As opposed to the more traditional contact center experience, 8x8 Engage allows employees outside of the contact center to interface with customers and deliver top-notch experiences. Employees would have greater flexibility with the ability to support customers from anywhere, which would be a huge boost for productivity and customer experience.

“We’re not a traditional contact center,” says Richard. “So we went looking for something that made sense for our needs. 8x8 Engage comes at a great price point, and it’s a perfect option for us because it gives us the functionality that we need. Plus, 8x8 offers licensing mix and match flexibility, which is huge for us.”

A bespoke, right-sized solutionlink to this section

After considering a few different approaches, 8x8 worked with Richard and his team to devise a bespoke solution that included both 8x8 Contact Center and 8x8 Engage. “We have two distinct teams with their own use cases,” explains Richard. The e-commerce team needed the more traditional contact center solution, whereas the service team is more focused on voice interactions, and was a better fit for 8x8 Engage. Instead of having to choose just one path, Richard utilizes different configurations for different teams, resulting in a right-sized solution for Kingspan at large.

The transition to 8x8 offered several key advantages. By eliminating on-premises PBXs, Kingspan significantly reduced infrastructure maintenance. The platform’s flexibility allowed them to repurpose existing Polycom handsets, minimizing migration costs. The cloud-based nature of 8x8 meant that employees could work from anywhere using softphones and headsets, a major advantage in an increasingly hybrid work environment. Additionally, advanced analytics provided deeper visibility into call performance and customer interactions, enabling smarter decision making.

"With 8x8, we achieved our goal of cutting our costs in half. And it’s great that we adopted Engage—for us, it’s a better fit."

Richard Gray, IT Manager, Kingspan Water & Energy

After a successful deployment in the UK and Ireland, Kingspan expanded 8x8 to Norway, Belgium, Poland, and Australia. “We rolled 8x8 out to about six countries in less than six months—it was a great success,” says Richard. “I remember our finance director was really impressed with how quick, seamless, and easy the migration was.”

Responsive, happy, and snazzylink to this section

Richard and his team also rely on 8x8’s Supervisor Workspace and Frontdesk features to keep things running smoothly at Kingspan. Supervisor Workspace is the one-stop destination for visibility into operations, interactions, data and analytics, and basically everything supervisors need to ensure their teams deliver excellent customer experiences. And Frontdesk is 8x8’s efficient high-volume call-handling solution. “The product team was quite responsive, and I’m happy that Frontdesk was implemented,” says Richard. “And Supervisor Workspace is this nice, graphical dashboard. It’s quite snazzy.”

Richard and his team at Kingspan have noticed some tremendous improvements after moving communications to 8x8. By moving away from outdated on-premises systems and embracing 8x8’s CX platform, Kingspan has improved operational agility and customer engagement. And it all comes without a massive price tag, with the company saving an estimated £70,000 (around $87,000 USD) per year after ditching the old on-premises infrastructure and making the switch to 8x8.

“With 8x8, we achieved our goal of cutting our costs in half,” says Richard. “And it’s great that we adopted Engage—for us, it’s a better fit.”