8x8 Work is a collaboration hub for phone, video, and messaging. It brings secure unified communication and collaboration experiences to every employee.
$24
per month
HCL Sametime
Score 7.9 out of 10
N/A
HCL Sametime (formerly IBM Lotus Sametime, acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in 2018) is an enterprise-level unified communications and VoIP platform. It includes features such as instant messaging, web conferencing, voice and video integration, telephony capabilities, and presence information.
In our experience, customer service is "ok" if it is a quick fix item. Anything that requires multiple touches turns into a nightmare for us. For example, an account rep mistakenly added a toll-free line instead of a standard local line. It took multiple follow-ups and weeks before seeing the adjustment in our system. Another situation is related to external texting. As a small business, we do not have a dedicated IT person. We have been attempting to move through the process to have our outbound texting campaigns approved so that we can effectively communicate with our clients who choose and prefer this type of communication. In our experience, follow-up and response are non-existent, forcing us to create additional service tickets because our "escalation request" goes unresponded. They then mark the new case as a "duplicate" and refer you back to the original case, where you receive no response. As a small business, this is impacting our ability to service our clients effectively and is having a direct impact to our business. Especially when I have been told other providers are working with companies like mine and have been able to move through this process more effectively or without any lifting on behalf of the user.
Sametime is well suited for very quick conversations, where you know the person is an active Sametime user. It also serves as an easy way to reach out to someone you may not know when looking for an answer to a quick question, as they are likely to be a Sametime user. Do not, under any circumstances, attempt to use Sametime for Audio or Video chat. The quality and reliability are horrendous.
Sametime's web-based interfaces are "zero load", requiring no plug-ins to be installed to join a meeting, launch a meeting, or use chat in a browser. A plugin is required only if you want to share your screen.
Integration with IBM Notes is very tight. Sametime's chat status can change according to your Notes calendar. You can easily see if someone who just emailed you is available to chat. Your chat History is right inside Notes as well.
IBM's mobile apps are top notch. We automated the apps for our users thanks to IBM's work with third party MDMs. This made it very simple for us to deploy the Sametime mobile apps -- Chat and Meetings -- and get new capabilities such as Audio & Video mobilized quickly.
No down time, ever. The rock solid WebSphere back-end of Sametime means the environment is always up. Period.
Some of the line porting was more complicated and took longer than initially quoted
10-15 minute delay in the email integration feature caused us to look for an alternative option for ticketing. We need the ability to reply to our customers instantly
SMS and fax included in the lower licenses tiers like many competitors do
All our employees love this product. No one has ever had an issue, whether it be the phone or fax. Great during the winter when employees have to work from home because of the snow. Never had an issue with the phone app. Highly recommend this product
Sametime is now an embedded experience for our users. They know it, they like it, they use it, and they expect it to be wherever they are. Because it is pretty easy to use and NEVER goes down, users know they can rely on it and won't be frustrated by it. Sametime is right up with there with Microsoft Office in terms of user adoption and appreciation.
Again for a large call center with many needs, and full time people to manage this may be a good system, but for a small business needing a phone system in my opinion it is overly complicated and difficult to manage without multiple calls on support.
Just about everything works the way you expect it would and it's relatively easy for users to figure out. Sametime was one of those things that we started with only a few people as a "test" and before the test period was done we discovered a few hundred people had figured out how to log in and most got it working all on their own. Many of our users want to use Sametime and do so regularly; we do not have to create policies enforcing its usage. Users find it practical to use Sametime to do things like chat, transfer files, share their screen, and so forth.
As mentioned before, we have not had an outage with the phone system per say, There was an issue with the call center where we did have an outage, but it was quickly and promplty handled by 8x8 support, they got us up and going again within 24 hours. The 8x8 hard phone and softphone side of things have been rock solid, I couldn't ask for anything more seeing we are in health care and it's exactly what we were looking for. When and if there is an issue 99% of the time it's user error
Typically if Sametime is not available, it's because Windows Updates were done on the servers and they were not rebooted. However, that's not a problem with Sametime -- in fact, if you have Linux you could probably run Sametime for years without any hiccups whatsoever. We have no internal Linux expertise.
None of the features that are available slow down the application. The reports (even the ones with hundreds of records) complete very quickly and the web interface as well as the mobile application never struggle to load or complete a task. The analytics will sometimes take some time to reflect the online status of users but it is to be expected due to connection speeds.
Generally very good. Occasionally AV or screen-sharing will stutter and every now and then I hear of it dropping out altogether, but in all cases it was easy to re-establish
8x8 support can be phenomenal. After getting in touch with a support member, all of my problems are either solved right away or throughout a small time frame, fine-tuned to my circumstance/issue. Whether they are following up via phone call or email, I have full confidence and faith that any matter will be resolved. Trying to contact the support team is where things get a bit tricky. Raising an issue in the chat can be taxing as we are mostly referred to the general FAQ section of the site. Although it may be helpful to some, it does nothing for those of us that have very specific problems. If each account holder can receive access to a customer service line that differs from non-member account holders, I think we'd have a higher level of trust and a lower level of frustration.
The person giving the training was very engaged, He also listened and answered all the questions. He created a video for our company while he was training in case we needed to reference it again in the future. The questions he could not answer were answered within 24 hours via an email to the IT support staff here so we could share the answers with the rest of the group
The implementation of 8x8 X was rather smooth. We had training prior to getting the system. The IT company did a good job on the training. The whole system is wonderful. Saves me so much time with the faxing, as i can just let it go by itself and not have to make sure pages don't get skipped, as with a regular fax machine.
Hands down 8x8 is superior to the Spectrum Ring Central that we had tried. Interestingly, they supplied the same phone hardware but were unable to suggest an adapter for wifi for the phones. Cost wise very similar but customer experience very different. Above all else, the quality of customer service has made all the difference
We use Jabber globally in our company and Symphony (no relevant app in able list) in some of the teams as well. All these are instant messenger tools, but Sametime is the easiest one to be used and its chat history is easy to be searched. Sametime can be used to contact almost all internal staff as it’s included in default computer package. Symphony is used to chat with front end business while Jabber is used for call.
At this time, we’re very happy with the pricing model that we have worked out and they have provided for us. Just be sure to do your homework, and use your comparisons to work out your cost with 8x8. They will be very straightforward with you on what they can adjust for you.
8x8 100% suits Business needs to connect with from anywhere and everywhere. The Softphone features is very light and very easy to use also very reliable with Zero Downtime. Can also be set personal Voicemail over softphone at anytime and logs everything is very easy to find.
Sametime is rock solid. It runs on WebSphere, DB2 and other related IBM technologies. This does mean the back-end is highly complex and very difficult to learn and get comfortable with, however.
PS had all the users etc. set up by our go-live date. All hard phones were activated and when we received them, all we had to do was set them up and punch in the activation code to activate them.
