Efficiency drained by outdated systems
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 This patchwork of outdated infrastructure created inefficiencies, made remote work difficult, and drove up maintenance costs.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 tools
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 solution
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.
