Are we too obsessed with talking about business communications architecture?

This is Part Three of Making Every Conversation Count, an ongoing video series featuring 8x8 CEO Sam Wilson and Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Miller covers customer engagement, CX strategy, and AI-driven business outcomes.

In all of our endless conversations about the value of architecture and its many intelligently assembled layers, we forget that most of the people using any SaaS product (including an 8x8 product) just want some very essential things from it:

• It works, no bugs or errors.
• It does what I want and need it to do.
• And it makes my job a little bit easier.

It really is as basic as that. Your average CX operator doesn’t start their mornings with a hot cup of coffee and an intellectual exploration of business communications architecture. Not directly, anyway.

As much as the technical architecture matters, just like the foundation of a house, they didn’t buy the platform to admire its latticework. They bought it to solve a problem. They’re in the business of keeping customers and figuring out the best way of meeting that goal.

Customers Will Notice When Things Don’t Feel Right

Your customers care even less about which platform you’re running. When it all works, neither you nor your customer is thinking about the architecture.

But people do notice if they have to explain their issue three times across chat, email, and a phone call. When customers get upset, your CX operator’s smooth “I turn it on, and it works” morning turns into a morning full of “why is this thing I pay for preventing me from meeting my customers where they’re at?”

This is What the Issue Looks Like Across Multiple Industries

There’s an oft-referenced statistic from last year’s Forrester Global CX Index: the gap is widening between the customer experience brands aim for and what customers actually get.

According to a Forrester analyst from the Index, “Customer experience continues to erode worldwide, reflecting a concerning multiyear downward trend and a shift in sentiment from positive to neutral.”

Organizations are increasingly looking for solutions that both enable them to smooth out customer journeys and don’t just force-feed customers the business’s own opinion on how those journeys should unfold.

So it makes sense that CPaaS is one of the fastest-growing segments in the business communications space.

In my recent conversation with Liz Miller, we discussed how there’s no new normal for setting the standard for customer communications. One demographic prefers voice, another chat, and sometimes preferences don’t even map ideally across categories.

Outcomes Over Architecture

That means the ideal solution should handle that unpredictability without causing endless friction. Worrying about what’s under the hood retreats into the background for both the user and their customer.

To give customers that seamless experience they crave, you need a platform that’s built with that seamlessness as a top priority. All the reliability, the integration, and the unified context —that’s the quietly purring engine.

When I talk about what makes 8x8 amazing, I’m also trying to step outside my CEO worldview, where I center the technology and all its intricacies. We need to realize that ultimately, the goal isn’t to wax prolific about the shiny gears and smoothly oiled parts.

Our goal is to enable our customers to help their customers get the answers and help they need, on the channel they want.