CIO’s looking for ways to help employees stay connected and collaborate while working in different locations around the globe are faced with a complex variety of devices, applications, and collaboration technologies. While employees have access to many of these technologies on their personal devices, the traditional barriers of complexity and costs have limited deployment of business-class solutions to larger enterprises.
Enter unified cloud communications. A cloud communications solution offers businesses a unified telecommunications service that leverages newfound reliability and advanced technology, without the cost and complexity associated with larger enterprise solutions.

But not all unified communications solutions are created equal

With a focus on providing maximum benefit with minimum impact on your company, 8×8 has built a single Cloud Communications and Contact Center platform that enhances the customer experience by harmonizing the employee experience. Here’s how the platform optimizes the communications experience:

1. Offloads complexities to the cloud

Bringing voice, collaboration tools, contact center and real-time analytics to the cloud removes the need to purchase, provision, manage and maintain on-premise equipment. It removes the expense of expert administrators, means fewer vendors, fewer bills and fewer apps, while connecting employees from across the street to around the globe, 8×8’s Cloud Communications and Contact Center platform makes it easier to meet customer needs and exceed their expectations.

2. One phone number, multiple devices

In today’s communications-drenched work environment, both customers and employees demand immediate access via their preferred communication device. Problem is, switching between different devices leaves data behind and requires different passwords, protocols and too many apps and configurations to manage.

With 8×8’s Cloud Communications and Contact Center solution, your employees and customers can continue to engage one another using their preferred devices, but on a single, unified platform that allows a streamlined, consistent experience. Chat, mobile phones, softphones, desktop phones, instant messages and video chat are integrated from the ground up on one platform, removing the siloes that many businesses are currently contending with as they struggle to keep up with the changing landscape of communications.

3. 21st Century collaboration capabilities

With offices in multiple locations where employees can tap resources well beyond their physical locations, having a cloud-built unified communications platform that can integrate multiple devices into one number and offer advanced collaboration is critical. 8×8’s built-in collaboration allows for an extended reach to a broader pool of experts, improved decision making, and more engaged employees. This new dimension of business communications dials in productivity while creating a richer experience for employees and clients, allowing for more innovation and competitiveness, regardless of the size of business or the market you’re in.

In fact, that’s why 8×8 has spent the past half decade building and acquiring technology across two previously separate categories: unified communications and contact center solutions.  It is by no stroke of coincidence that 8×8 offers products that specifically enable organizations to leverage their employees, experts and data to innovate and serve customers in ways that build true business value.

4. Better Call Quality

8×8’s communications-as-a-service model affords companies with enhanced call quality on a supremely stable and reliable communications platform. By including seamless failover capability that requires no additional capital, rack space or servers to maintain, they’re able to deliver maximum communications uptime for clients. Where traditional infrastructure and premise-based systems can be configured for disaster recovery, this process can be complex and riddled with missteps that mean when disaster strikes, the phone systems take hours or days to recover. 8×8’s Cloud Communications and Contact Center assures maximum availability and rapid disaster recovery without the bottlenecks and single-points of failure that weigh down premise-based legacy systems, so your business can stay connected no matter what happens.

Contact our specialists to learn how 8×8’s Cloud Communications and Contact Center Platform can enrich the employee experience and deliver an exceptionally positive customer experience.

81% of CIOs believe IT is entering a new era of customer-driven initiatives. Businesses are increasingly embracing cloud communications to craft better customer experiences. Some IT executives, failing to recognize the opportunities cloud solutions can bring to their businesses, are reluctant to adopt this new communications platform. Savvy CIOs view it as a key enabler of a more agile, connected employee and customer experience. They recognize that providing employees with a more aligned communications platform will empower them to deliver a superior experience for customers. As with any new technology, there are several misconceptions and questions to consider.

These 8 most-asked questions will shed some light on how transformative cloud communications can be for your business:

1. Is it cost-effective? Cloud is more agile and requires less infrastructure than its on-premises counterpart. You only pay for what you use, allowing most companies to reap the benefits of savings while gaining in highly desirable collaboration, mobility and customer engagement features for employees.
2. Is cloud right for my size business? Not all cloud solutions offer the robust capabilities and reliable platform to work as a successful communications model for companies. 8×8’s Cloud Communications and Contact Center platform supports 50,000 global businesses of all sizes, with a cloud solution that can grow with you, easily scaling up or down without compromising features.
3. How reliable is a cloud solution? Again, this depends on the solution you deploy, but cloud solutions are far more reliable than on-site hosted phone systems. 8×8’s Cloud Communications and Contact Center platform can increase your uptime significantly. Their agreements include a money-backed guarantee of 99.99% uptime. Can your PBX provider offer the same?
4. Will I get global call capabilities? With 15 redundant data centers distributed across the globe, 8×8’s Cloud Communications and Contact Center platform offers international local, toll-free and local number transfer services in over 80 countries. Plus, 8×8’s patented geo-routing algorithm delivers the highest call quality regardless of where the caller is in the world.
5. How accessible is it? If it is a complete cloud communications solution, the solution delivers the full breadth of UC and contact center capabilities with the flexibility to add capabilities and users as needed. This includes contact centers and calling platforms. With a cloud communications system from 8×8 everything is accessible anytime, anywhere from any device.
6. Can it do what my phone does now? Nobody wants you to give up capabilities. A cloud communications solution from 8×8 offers you the full breadth of capabilities you depend on today including voice, video, messaging, meetings and customer engagement tools to improve productivity and revenues for your company.
7. Is a cloud solution secure and compliant with government regulations? It should be! 8×8’s Cloud Communications and Contact Center platform is backed with industry-leading security and compliance standards and has passed third-party audits for compliance with HIPAA, PCI-DSS, FISMA and other U.S. regulations.
8. How do you pay for cloud? Cloud solutions are often more accessible to businesses of any size because instead of a capital outlay, they can be paid for monthly as an operating expense. 8×8‘s flexible mix of service packages provide more cost-effective solutions, while also reducing the amount of specialized IT skills and resources required to make the phones work.

Not all cloud communications solutions are created equal. A single Cloud Communications and Contact Center solution from 8×8 offers companies ONE platform that aligns and engages on all channels, creating a harmonized platform that empowers employees to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Everyone’s talking about cloud solutions. Get the facts first. Contact us to learn more.

Sometimes, we need to destroy the status quo to create a new model of engagement. Sometimes, the market does that for us and that can be even scarier. Change is always scary and overwhelming, especially when it comes to technology. But it is inevitable.

The Cloud is changing the way businesses communicate. Businesses have a unique opportunity to capitalize on this major shift to offer a secure, seamless communications experience that is simpler to deploy and more intuitive to use. If you want to play the game, the siloed, broken communications of yesterday aren’t going to cut it any longer.

Regardless of what business you’re in, your customer’s experience is your top priority. Customers increasingly prefer human interaction over digital communications channels, positioning your communications systems as a key enabler for delivering superior customer experience. Cloud communications offers your company a unique opportunity to craft the ideal customer experience, creating a competitive advantage few companies have thought to seize upon. With shifting demands and perceptions, it comes down to the company that’s intrepid enough to pull the trigger first.
Here are a few mindsets that help your organization prioritize customer experience:

Every department is a service department

In today’s highly competitive market, customer loyalty is no longer entrenched as part of our social culture. In fact, 90% of customers today feel that businesses are too slow and unresponsive. 59% of those customers will try your competitor for a better experience, without hesitation. Legacy, premises-based phone systems offer siloed, fractured and inconsistent communications that reinforce breakdowns in employee and customer interactions and slow your ability to provide service. In short, they simply can’t compete with the cloud’s ability to seamlessly integrate communications systems with business applications and processes. The implication is businesses that more quickly adapt to this modern approach to communications will be the clear winner among customers.

Every conversation is an opportunity

Every conversation customers have with your employees provide an opportunity to deliver superior customer service. 20th century PBX systems were never designed to support the remote, distributed workforce of the 21st century. Employees increasingly demand the ability to work flexible schedules from the location of their choosing, across multiple devices. According to a 2015 Citrix and Forrester study in 2015, 85% of employees use a mobile device for work. And yet most traditional PBX systems, with their hardwired infrastructures, can’t easily accommodate needs of this increasingly wireless, mobile workforce. When employees use tools like personal laptops, mobile devices, Google Hangouts, Skype and Facetime to accomplish this, information leaves company networks to unsecured devices, and collaboration becomes more difficult.

Failure is not an option

Current business communications options, like traditional PBX phone systems, have many shortcomings. One of the most significant is the cost and complexity of ensuring your phones are one of the first services restored after any adverse event. While it is possible to develop an effective disaster recovery solution with a premises-based solution, it is not as seamless and cost-effective as a cloud solution. Moving to cloud-based business communications is a painless way to ensure a disaster doesn’t leave your phones down for hours or – worse yet – days.

New isn’t always better. However, when sweeping technology changes impact the expectations of customers, businesses must keep up. If the only thing holding you back is a fear of change, consider the risks and benefits. What would more accessible employees mean for your business? How could enhanced collaboration improve time to market? What would a 99.99% uptime mean for your profitability? The fact is you must leverage your communications effectively if you want to remain competitive.

Don’t fear change. Embrace it. Contact Premier Team Inc to find out how we can help you leverage better communications for the 21st century.