The contact center has come a long way from its days as a dumping ground for warm bodies, a barely-tolerated yet indispensable operation for handling irate callers and generating little more than massive turnover. That's changed in recent years, and now the contact center is the central point for customer contact and preserving the best in customer experience. To help on that front, 8x8 has made significant advancements and released the first of its kind communications cloud, as well as made new acquisitions to improve operations.
With 8x8's new 8x8 Communications Cloud, potential business users can choose from an array of collaboration tools according to needs on the ground without having to check for points of interoperability; everything on the cloud appears to work with everything else.
This is a development helped out substantially by another development from 8x8, the recent acquisition of LeChat, makers of the Sameroom system that provides a measure of interoperability in its own right for a variety of cross-team collaboration and messaging tools. This gives 8x8 a lot more room to offer connectivity in the field backed up by the proper infrastructure to allow that connection to take place.
With Sameroom in place, 8x8 also gets new perspective on building group messaging solutions, along with insight into the biggest communication and collaboration apps, which makes the end result more useful to those geographically separated but ideologically unified team members going forward.
8x8's CEO, Vik Verma, commented, “This convergence of two healthy and thriving markets- communications and collaboration- is going to change the way employees, customers and partners use and consume communications intelligence, making them better informed, more productive and more effective than ever before. The days of a fragmented communications landscape are numbered.”
This is the description of a highly valuable tool, particularly for the contact center. As companies push toward an omnichannel customer experience, trying to address the fragmented landscape of chat functions is an extreme challenge. After all, if a company has made all its plans around handling Twitter, what happens when someone wants to use Skype or even IRC? Are these users to be left out in the cold? Even a small minority of users can represent a fairly large piece of market share, and no one wants to pass potential market on to the competition. It's also worth noting inside a business; a mobile workforce increasingly has diffusion as bring your own device (BYOD) becomes bring your own chat platform, which raises still more trouble.
A tool like 8x8, therefore, can make for an excellent alternative to help unify this diffuse field. That means a better experience, better internal collaboration, and a better chance of repeat business from outside as well.