8x8 Contact Center is a cloud-based platform that unifies customer interactions across voice, chat, email, video, SMS, and social. It offers intelligent self-service automation, real-time analytics, and CRM integrations. With omnichannel engagement, agents deliver consistent, personalized service from one interface.
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Alvaria Workforce
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Alvaria Workforce (formerly Aspect Workforce Management), is a suite of software which combines call center workforce management with advanced analytics features like call recording, speech analytics, eLearning for training, data sharing for schedule optimization across call center or branch locations, and desktop analytics for monitoring and analyzing discrete actions like employee keystrokes and application usage. The Basic, Advanced, and Enterprise tiers include…
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Genesys PureConnect (discontinued)
Score 6.8 out of 10
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Genesys PureConnect was an omnichannel contact center platform that offered cloud-based or on-premise deployments. It featured a SIP-based architecture with VoIP capabilities, allowing companies to connect legacy voice systems and use existing phones. A legacy product, new users are encouraged to investigate Genesys Cloud.
We liked the agent experience, as well as the reporting and some of the QM & CE suites. The self-service options and customizability of contact center routing scripts was desirable. Overall when finalizing vendors 8x8 was one of the more cost-effective options between the UCaaS …
We spend a lot of time calling insurance companies to check claim status, verify benefits, or fix denials. 8x8 is great for handling high call volume days when our team is making and receiving a ton of those calls. The call routing makes sure insurance calls go to our billing reps and patient calls go to the right team, so things don’t get mixed up. If we’re doing a compliance review or responding to an insurance dispute and need a specific recorded call from months ago, it can take some digging to find it unless we have exact details. It’s not impossible, just not super quick
Easy workforce management tool and the dashboard is well designed with multiple accessible functionalities. This platform allows easy data collection across other project management systems and the analytics which the tool provides are excellent and very reliable project planning and easy scheduling with effective and excellent management functionalities and initial implementing is also an easy process.
CIC is best suited for business models that rely on heavily leverage Data Integration especially one like ours that require real-time and high-speed data access for billing and customer integration. CIC is not well suited for small organizations < 50 where they are only answering phones in the course of doing business VS. the business is the phone.
There's a few feature gaps that have been called out for years that haven't been addressed yet. I.e. passing calls from UC to CC requires a phone number (like why?)
Another frequent complaint I get is "why can't I just completely shut off a user's voicemail". You can fiddle with call forwarding rules, but sooner or later, an errant call finds a way to end up there.
The configuration of the system is quite complex and very difficult to administer.
Initial training on the product is simply focused on the product and it typically not done using a customers real data. Since many customers do not have a strong background in WFM to begin with, the training should focus more on the fundamental of WFM before it dives into how to use the tool. You have to learn more about how it is best to use the tool for real world environments and not just how to click here and go there.
RTA has not been updated in years. It does not offer real-time schedule adherence scores and the reporting is terrible. Reporting is specific to each workspace and you lose data each time you close a workspace.
The shrinkage calculator feature that was added a few years ago is a great feature but very difficult to reconcile. If you are not an extreme expert with the very confusing superstate philosophy in eWFM it can be disastrous.
8x8 contact center is meeting our needs as a call center communication solution. We use 8x8 across the entire organization and have been able to work with our account management team to ensure our configuration and integrations meet our business, legal & compliance needs across the organization. The greatest benefit has been the 8x8 account management team who consistently works with us to ensure our needs are being met.
While I support other customers who utilize the software, the response from our customers is over-whelmingly positive. Many customers who have not had any type of workforce management software in the past use spreadsheets to schedule and forecast agents. This can be extremely complicated and a nightmare to control. The time saved by having a product that can quickly complete these functions for you is worth the investment. Also, we have several customers who had no way to track what their agents are doing and have found many problems in their call-center with the software. After rolling out a program where their adherence was tracked and actually 'mattered', they were able to see increased efficency from their agents.
We are so embedded on Pure Connect that we like to progress with it. For instance, we are looking into ways to provide different solutions to our customers, help our business to succeed, and work in a better CX.
One of the biggest advantages is that all is in one platform.
Incredibly simple to use the platform - clear, insightful, and impactful dashboards and access to relevant call metrics. GUI is nice and easy to read and interact with. It is clear to see that UX has been tested thoroughly. Internal feedback has been positive on its usability and ease of access. UI is very intuitive.
Once the initial set up of the software is complete and/or you are familiar with the software, it is easy to use and runs like a dream. However, if you are unfamiliar with the software or have used a competitor's product, some features can seem difficult to learn or get used to.
The interface is only semi user-friendly on almost every front. Agent experience is lacking and we have found many limitations within the system. Workforce forecasting is not as robust as expected. Quality continues to be a struggle. Interaction searches are not robust.
The application itself uses a hub and spoke model that can help isolate errors in one section of the application from the rest, creating a much more stable overall program. Of all of the outages that we've had with our contact center platform, I can count on one hand how often it was truly a Genesys issue rather than a network issue, server issue or issue with a platform relied upon for an integration (web services, db calls).
Some of the client applications take a bit of time on initial load, but with the move towards web based applications that issue is alleviated. You can tell that effort really isn't putting into the desktop apps any longer and that the client development effort is being put into bringing Interaction Connect closer to feature parity with the desktop (and bringing wholly new features to Connect). As far as IVR operations, web service calls, database operations: they all operate reasonably.
Charlie Knutson is fantastic, however when you call the support number it is almost impossible to get through and when you do they cannot fix your issue. That is the biggest challenge. It is a difference between that and reaching our contact directly. The email support number that our company was given is very responsive and good.
I was impressed with the support I received. There were never any long delays when I had issues and the representatives that I worked with were always patient and eager to fully understand not only my problem but our business processes surrounding the problem.
Some cases are resolved quickly others are taking longer and the reseller sometimes has to chase support several times and explain the issue seen several times. While being a direct customer before, I recognise this and it seems that when a case moves to another engineer they don’t read the previous case notes or don’t understand what has been done. This, from a customers perspective, slows down resolution times.
Detailed training and good quality to provide our customers to achieve their needs and to give the best we can as far as information and technology and the best service we can to have the customers be satisfied with the technology and the best quality to get the best answers to their doubts.
I liked the setup of the whole class. The instructor knew the topic well enough to answer questions from entry level to a more advanced one.
Instructor encouraged participation of the whole class and was able to engage every one. Also provided "real live" examples so everyone can relate to it.
The training was easy but would probably be much easier in person. Easier to ask questions and show someone your computer when you are in person. Easier to differentiate between network issues and 8x8 issues. Online works too but for how technical 8x8 can be, I would recommend you try and do in person if possible. Would make it much easier to get help when needed. This is a personal preference and not something that is required by any means. The online training is still great and still did the trick. The good thing is that help is always available months or years after if there is something new you want to do
The online training itself is good. You are provided resources and can self study to a certain point, but the pacing always felt off. Either snails pace or like trying to drink from a fire hose. I think this easily could have had to do with course material and my personal preparations, though. I would say my main gripe is that since the acquisition the team responsible for actually booking training is very unresponsive and often not knowledgeable about the courses they offer. Booking my last training was a real chore.
The transition from Mitel to 8 x 8 was smooth and no "hiccups". The support was one of the best that we had received. No surprises except what 8 x 8 is actually capable of doing! Support remained available throughout the transition! Co-workers were amazed at what they were able to do with having 8 x 8,
Implementation of the software was not difficult but it was tedious for us due to the fact that our processes had not kept up with the times and we had to make a large number of process changes along with setting up the software.
Don't try to go the perfect solution as a first target. Work on answer the more needs with a simple solution. Then analyse and try again to answer the most needs with adding a bit if complexity only if require. No needs to customise straight from the beginning or deployment takes too long.
I prefer 8x8; it has the right number of features and modes for the communication I need. I much prefer 8x8 meetings to Zoom meetings, as it is much, much easier to transition between devices when I am on the road. 8x8 is also easier to manage across multiple modes of communication.
I have used NICE IEX Workforce Management in addition to Aspect Workforce Management, both tools are great at what they do. Aspect however builds its forecast model continuously, adding more information to the model everyday, where are with IEX, the model has to be built each and every time from used selections each week. IEX does not have a historical base model to reference, where Aspect does.
Call Manager, you had to buy all the components that are out of the box for PureConnect. The licensing model is more expensive on the Cisco side vs the Genesys PureConnect side. Lastly was on the Cisco side since you have to connect/integrate all the components on the cisco side you have to have so many vendors to install those parts. This drives the cost up even more so it was not worth going that route for our organization.
Genesys PureConnect's core and adjunct model allows for fairly easy growth in satellite locations via off site session managers, remote located media servers, remote content servers, etc to allow you to spread the infrastructure out while not pushing as much network traffic to your core data centers.
The callback queue was a big thing for a while. Still is to a point but we would have MANY duplicate callbacks & it was frustrating to both the customer & the agent.
Support is my biggest negative for 8x8 Contact Center. Being able to communicate with someone is essential yet having MANY support agents have a language barrier has made it difficult on both ends to get things addressed/taken care of. Being able to follow the requests of the ticket is a big one as well. I talked about both of these points before, but if I request to communicate via email 9/10 times, I am being called to talk about the problem when it could have been an email. They also request information MANY many times that seems to be useless when I have provided what I think to be all the necessary information. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It has been a little bit since I have had to put anything in for support the last one I did it was substantially better so hopefully that continues.
Being able to work solely on 8x8 work or 8x8 Contact Center would be a HUGE plus for agents & IT. I see other platforms that are able to do this, if 8x8 was able to do this it would make it 100x better for us so we don't have to work out of two things for an agent to be able to work.
The last thing is the plans. Not offering an unlimited talking plan to me seems very weird. What we are paying for & the amount of minutes that agents are using doesn't make a lot of sense on a billing standpoint. Offering better pricing/unlimited plans for enterprise like other companies would be a HUGE plus as well.
The workforce management team was able to decrease the cycle time forecasting, staffing and scheduling staff; resulted in higher employee engagement
The scenario based planning enabled us to develop a more accurate call volume forecast thus staffing the contact centers appropriately; approximately $500k savings realized in labor expenses (reduced FTE headcount, while meeting the same level of service level measures)
Improved customer experience due to staffing the call center properly (answered 80 percent of our calls within 20 seconds)
We're improving our CX by optimizing our call centers, using additional attributes and keys to identify the best rep for the job.
We are also streamlining the journey of each individual customer by using PureConnect as the central interface for omnichannel interactions, allowing us to pick up the conversation where we left off.
Using additional attributes that start with the contact center interaction, we're able to track a student journey and proactively step in - increasing our individualized support to focus on the student outcome.
