8×8 has recently undertaken a foundational pivot, shifting from a company with communication and collaboration at its core to one with customer experience making up its central identity.
Concurrently, 8×8’s ‘XCaaS’ platform – housing an integrated mix of unified communication, customer experience, and Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) capabilities – has been renamed the ‘8×8 Platform for Customer Experience (CX)’.
Given the importance of customer experience in the market, both the pivot and the new name make sense. Organisations are under intense pressure from customers to forge deeper connections. To meet that demand, contact centres have been undergoing a profound transformation with the concept of a ‘contact centre’ yielding to the broader concept of ‘customer experience’. Contact centres are converting from agent-centric to including self-service, from reactive to proactive, from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented, and from generic to deeply personalised.
8×8 platform enhancements
To help organisations make the transition, 8×8 and rivals such as Cisco, Microsoft, and Zoom have been rolling out a steady stream of capabilities. 8×8 has been very busy recently with new rounds of platform enhancements that are intrinsic to its makeover.
A sample of noteworthy features includes: an AI assistant for composing chat messages; the ability for employees outside the contact center to engage with customers via digital channels; the introduction of JourneyIQ, which gives businesses the capability to optimise the customer journey across all channels, departments, and touchpoints; and the announcement of AI Orchestrator which enables interaction between bots from different vendors and supports hand-offs between bots and human agents.
Change comes at a cost
However, 8×8’s change in direction comes with a cost. The 8×8 Platform for CX houses the same trio of capabilities previously found on the XCaaS platform. The new platform label along with 8×8’s metamorphosis into a customer experience company could lead some in the market to believe that 8×8 is now solely focused on customer experience. The positioning that 8×8 took so long to build – as a provider of integrated unified communication, customer experience, and CPaas – is at risk of getting lost.
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By GlobalDataIn an ideal world, 8×8 would simply reverse course and return to the land of ‘XCaaS’. But that is of course unrealistic given the complexities of a rebranding and repositioning of the size 8×8 has executed. Instead, 8×8 needs to communicate loud and clear – and repeatedly – that in addition to customer experience, it still provides unified communication and CPaaS and delivers those features in an integrated package. The sooner, the better.
