8x8 Contact Center is a solution that helps businesses boost engagement, collaboration, and operational effectiveness for customer success. Built on the 8x8 XCaaS platform, 8x8 Contact Center helps businesses to connect and collaborate with individuals working inside and outside of the organization.
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Genesys PureConnect (discontinued)
Score 6.1 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.
8x8 Contact Center has made my Care Center run much more efficiently. It is a move that I wish we had made many years ago. There have not been any days that we have had a disruption in service and the quality of the calls are always perfect.
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.
Tracks all inbound and outbound calls from our organization.
Gives us the ability to record and review calls.
Gives the user the ability to receive phone call either via computer, cell phone, or polycom phone when in-house - all received from the same static number/extension.
Post-sale support through the online ticket system is painfully slow.
It's hard to get in contact with people for license help and understanding why phone numbers are not properly distributed in your account. i.e. Our account has 48 free local numbers and we had to purchase 120 additional numbers. But for some reason only 25 of the 48 free numbers are being utilized, and there's no good way in the Admin UI to see which numbers are which, or reallocate paid numbers into those 'free' slots.
The system has bugs which pop up from time to time such as when a user uses the 'Do Not Disturb' option in their app or on their phone - it does not always turn off on the back-end of the system, even though the phone or app shows the user as available. This causes inbound phone calls to be routed directly to Voicemail, and the only notice the user has is when someone reaches out by other means to say "Why is your phone going directly to voicemail?" - which initiates a service ticket for IT who cannot see this in the admin center. And unless 'flipping' DND on then off again fixes it, it requires a ticket with 8x8 which is, as mentioned before, slow.
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.
The system is flexible, adaptable and easy to use and research. Once again the reporting is fantastic and gives up the information we need to be successful and even make changes or tweaks. The 8x8 Contact Center team is there to assist with questions when needed or to help get through an issue. Charlie Knutson is the best!!
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.
The initial live support person seems to be just collecting information and is outsourced. Sometimes it is difficult to communicate with them, but going through this process gets me to the right person and having my support ticket opened in order. It's usually very smooth thereafter.
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.
its was with the best quality and the best performance we could have as far as detailed information for us to get the best training on how to get used of 8*8 and provide the best quality and technology to provide to our customers when they need and made us fell comforatble in how to use it
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.
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.
Vonage was priced right on the install but escalated as the year went on and by the end of the second year, they had lost the edge they had over many other companies and forced a change by me. We had to work with a single account manager and that was hard when things went wrong on the system. The downtime was minimal with them also.
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 ROI for us is measured more within the CSAT and NPS score increase we have seen thus far, both scores have gone up significantly since we have streamlined our process with 8X8.
We are now focusing our attention on retention with the hopes of seeing a second wave of ROI with 8X8.
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.
