Provider Overview
8x8 is a leading Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) provider.
8x8’s comprehensive CPaaS platform includes cloud-based contact center functionality, VoIP calling, SMS chat, team collaboration, and web conferencing.
8x8’s offers four primary offerings: a unified communications (UCaaS) platform, a contact center solution, an AI-powered customer engagement platform, and APIs that can be used to build a custom system.
A multi-level call attendant feature and call queues are available in all business phone system plans, except for 8x8 Express. Additionally, all 8x8 customers benefit from 8x8’s advanced, secure video conferencing and team messaging platforms.
Find out more about the key features of 8x8’s platform, along with pricing, plans, customer service, and pros and cons below.
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8x8 Key Features
Some of 8x8’s key features are listed below.
Video Meetings
All 8x8 XCaaS customers have full access to 8x8 Meet, 8x8’s feature-rich HD video conferencing platform. Users can host as many meetings as they’d like to per month, and all meetings can last for an unlimited length of time.
The Express Plan allows up to 100 participants while all other plans allow up to 500. For larger events, 8x8 meetings can be live streamed on YouTube.
Participants can join an 8x8 meeting using a desktop browser, iOS or Android mobile app, or through the 8x8 platform. There is also an option to dial in from over 50 countries. 8x8 plans include up to 11 toll-free numbers that can be sent to participants for dial-in purposes.
8x8 video conferencing has all of the essential features needed for effective business meetings, including:
- Screen sharing
- Virtual backgrounds
- Foreign language support
- Dedicated meeting link
- Calendar integrations
- Video/audio/desktop recording
- Branding
8x8 also includes some unique features like advanced content sharing capabilities, which allow users to share videos on Youtube and audio clips directly to avoid any lag. 8x8 Meeting analytics offer insight into connection issues, participant information, and engagement levels.
8x8’s video conferencing really shines when it comes to security.
8x8 offers a number of advanced security features such as moderation controls, meeting lock, participant lobby, and participant permissions. Moreover, optional end-to-end encryption is available for any meeting. If end-to-end encryption is turned on, only participants with a shared key will be able to join the meeting.
Team Chat
8x8’s native team chat platform is included in all plans and connects employees across your organization with an intuitive, robust collaboration space. Employees in the company directory are automatically added to the Team Chat, and those outside the organization can join in the conversation too via third-party integrations with other chat platforms, like Slack.
Other 8x8 Team Chat features include:
- One-click video and audio calls
- 1:1 direct instant messaging
- Private and public channels
- File sharing of both documents and images
- Chat history search function
- @mention colleagues
- Customized notification settings
One unique time-saving feature of 8x8’s Team Chat is in-line replies. This feature allows team members to respond directly to a notification without having to open the app. Team members will receive a notification when they are tagged by a colleague using the @mention feature.
8x8 Omnichannel Routing
8x8’s Omnichannel Routing is a contact center feature that automatically routes customers to the agent best equipped to help them, no matter what communication method the customer uses.
With 8x8’s omnichannel communications solution, you can add all of your customer’s favorite communication channels such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and SMS into a unified interface. Agents can toggle back and forth between these digital channels in order to reach a fast resolution with customers.
Agents also have the ability to add call notes and other customer information directly into the business VoIP phone service interface. This way, when a customer has to move to a different agent or even a different department, they don’t have to repeat their history or issue.
8x8’s Omnichannel Routing system also allows for long-term custom care. Designed to capture as much data as possible on each of your customers, organizations using 8x8’s virtual office solution are empowered to provide their customers with customized follow-ups and relevant offers.
8x8 Quality Management and Speech Analytics
8x8’s Quality Management and Speech Analytics system (QM/SA) allows organizations to implement relevant and tailored coaching for agents in a hybrid or fully remote environment.
This system, also known as “Conversation IQ”, uses Artificial Intelligence to analyze 100% of contact center conversations across channels, evaluating for compliance, proficiency, and customer sentiment in real-time.
Call center supervisors use an intuitive dashboard to search conversations, @mention employees to provide coaching, create automated workflows for themselves or their employees, perform post-call survey classification, and create a library of best practice phone calls and snippets that are available to all agents on-demand. 8x8’s AI is advanced and has the ability to distinguish between speakers in recordings, filter for hot topics, and detect sentiment.
In addition to the aforementioned features, with Conversation IQ, supervisors have the ability to set multiple consistency goal thresholds for agents.
Support call quality is measured by adding up the number of times an agent met their goal and then dividing that by the total number of evaluations they have received, expressed as a percentage. For example, if an agent passes 5 out of their 10 evaluations, their consistency would be 50%. Setting multiple consistency goal thresholds allows supervisors to track how their agents are doing over long periods of time. They can set one threshold to see which agents hit their goal, another threshold to see which agents were close to hitting their goal, and a third threshold to see which agents had average or poor performances.
Finally, with QM/SA, managers can delegate tasks to other team members by assigning role-based permissions in the softphone app.
8x8’s QM/SA platform is a robust and powerful tool that is constantly being updated and improved.
Intelligent IVR
8x8 Intelligent IVR (IIVR) uses the latest conversational AI technology to enable customer self-service, capture and report on analytics, and route callers to the most suitable agent quickly without forcing them to hang up and dial another phone number.
IIVR must be purchased as an add-on feature. However, for a contact center with heavy call volume, it could be a game changer.
Standard IVR let admins set up basic call flows using a drag-and-drop editor (for example, “press 2 for sales”) and gain insight with advanced reporting and customer experience analytics.
Intelligent IVR goes even further, allowing businesses to create more complex, nuanced, and “human” speech-enabled call flows using Conversational AI. These call flows can be set up and modified via a graphic drag-and-drop interface.
8x8’s IIVR allows for the creation of robust self-service options. Using CRM integrations, data dips, speech recognition, and Natural Language Processing, IIVR can quickly identify issues that are best handled via self-service and direct customers accordingly. Common inquiries can be completely automated, saving customers time and reserving live agents for only the most complex issues. When an agent is needed, IIVR correlates subject matter, agent proficiency, and availability to find the best fit.
Using Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), IIVR captures detailed data from customers and provides rich analytics that can be used to identify where adjustments need to be made in the customer journey.
8x8 Plans and Pricing
8x8’s Pricing is currently quote-based, you will need to contact their sales team to get specific details. They offer pay-as-you-go pricing without commitments or contracts for some of their calling and texting services, but are mostly subscription-based with customized rates based on your organization size. 8x8 also offers enterprise plans for large scale operations.
8x8 has 4 major offerings: 8x8 Work, 8x8 Contact Center, 8x8 Engage, and an array of communications APIs.
8x8 Work
8x8’s Work is a UCaaS plan that includes VoIP, team messaging, SMS, video conferencing, collaboration, routing, analytics, and more.
8x8 Contact Center
8x8 offers 8x8 Contact Center, a comprehensive CCaaS platform. Features include an agent workspace, high volume messaging, omnichannel and skills-based routing, and more. 8x8's Contact Center combines these features with UCaaS tools like calling and video conferencing, with advanced queue management and conversational intelligence.
8x8 Engage
8x8 also offers 8x8 Engage, an AI-driven solution that unlocks customer experience (CX) capabilities beyond traditional contact centers. Tailored for customer-facing sales, field service, and retail employees across various departments, 8x8 Engage leverages both contact center and unified communications tools into a single powerful offering.
8x8 Communication APIs
8x8's Communication APIs are a no-code CPaaS solution enabling users to build a custom system that includes messaging, voice, video, and high-volume SMS capabilities. Protect customer data and privacy with 8x8 authentication and fraud prevention solutions to detect and block fraudulent traffic so you can focus on fostering real customer connections.
8x8 Integrations
8x8 is somewhat limited in integrations when compared to competitors, but it does offer a decent selection of key integrations to enhance team collaboration, customer relationship management (CRM) and productivity.
8x8 integrations include third party team collaboration platforms such as Teams, Slack, and GroupMe, security tools such as Okta, CRMs such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Hubspot, and productivity tools such as Google, Outlook, and NetSuite.
8x8 CRM
In addition to integrating with third-party CRMs, 8x8 includes a native CRM. 8x8 CRM is included. It consolidates all customer data and 8x8 contact center tools into one unified interface to increase agent productivity while reducing customer frustration.
8x8 CRM automatically displays customer records at the beginning of every interaction. Information can be added directly by agents or funneled in from other systems. As a native tool, every department has equal access to customer histories, eliminating data silos.
8x8 CRM can also route calls to the most suitable agent. It includes advanced customer experience analytics such as detailed customer journey maps and a targeted search function to identify pain points.
8x8 Pros & Cons
Below are some of the pros and cons of 8x8’s platform.
| 8x8 Pros |
8x8 Cons |
| Enterprise-Grade security for all plans and 99.999% uptime SLA included with almost every plan |
Hidden fees for advanced contact center features such as Intelligent IVR, Speech Analytics, Secure Pay, Auto Dialers, etc, which are not included and must be purchased as an add-on for most plans |
| Unlimited Calling to 48 countries |
Not as many integrations as competitors |
| Video Conferencing is available in all plans with up to 500 participants |
Lack of user-friendly setup plus a steep learning curve, especially since many many advanced features aren’t useful to startups and SMBs |
8x8 Customer Support
8x8’s 24/7 live customer support team (voice and live chat) is available to all business customers.
For those that prefer self-service, 8x8 has a knowledge base with tutorials and FAQs that can be accessed here: https://support.8x8.com/.
The knowledge base includes articles and user guides organized by product and topic. There is also an 8x8 community where users can connect with each other for assistance, view customer questions and answers, and join virtual live product demos. Finally, there is a chatbot/virtual assistant called Otto, which customers are encouraged to interact with before calling customer service. If Otto is unable to help, he can transition customers to a live chat rep.
8x8 customers can also open up a customer support case online or through the 8x8 Application Panel.
Is 8x8 Right For You?
8x8 is a secure, reliable, and feature-rich platform that’s an excellent choice for high-volume contact centers.
Advanced contact center features such as queued callback and post-call surveys, along with cutting-edge AI-powered features like Intelligent IVR and Quality Management, are most valuable to large enterprises with global and hybrid teams.
The main 8x8 drawback, however, is its price.
8x8 isn’t cheap compared to other VoIP providers. Plus, the most cutting-edge AI features must be purchased as add-ons. Still, it’s a solid investment for large/global contact centers that need to streamline operations, improve CX, and gain deeper insight into customer behavior.
For some small businesses, however, these features are overkill–and the lack of live customer support on the Express plan doesn’t help. They may wish to consider popular 8x8 alternatives known for their ease of use, like RingCentral, Ooma, and Dialpad.
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