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
OpenPhone
Score 7.5 out of 10
N/A
OpenPhone, a business phone service from the company of the same name in San Francisco, adds work phone numbers to existing devices. No new hardware required; all that's required is an app. Extended services include a lightweight contact management CRM, and customer service team management (e.g. shared inbox) features.
If you are a larger enterprise with a global span of offices equipped with a moderate to large IT department, you may prefer one of the more technically heavy/advanced solutions from others in this marketspace. The presumption there is that you may be looking for more customized, granular control of the application, its GUI and quite possibly- tinkering with certain coding or capabilities. You may also already have a large SaaS rollout already in place and 8x8 Work may either be redundant or lighter than the implementation you already have. If you are (i) a small to medium sized organization dependent on an outsourced IT and/or (ii) have a heavily non-IT user base who need access to more intuitive, end-user friendly tools that shorten the learning curve for them- without sacrificing strong security and data privacy compliance standards (US and EU standards); then this is a solution well worthwhile to consider adopting.
If you have more than 2 people in your organization, then this will save you so much time. Delegation is the key to starting a business. Even when you're a 1 person show, being able to present to your user base the differentiation of options for client communications is critical. As a founder, feeling compelled to be always on is something I strive not to be. OpenPhone gives you that flexibility. I have found it to be less appropriate in complex HIPPA compliant areas, but that is it. OpenPhone really does seem to suit an open array of use cases.
A transcript of voicemails would be a great addition for those with auditory processing issues.
When a call comes in on my personal device and I choose to ignore it, the pop-up for the incoming call does not go away; I can continue using my device until the call ends.
The ease of communication with customer service could have been improved. It was not terrible, but it could have been more helpful.
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
The 8x8 service has boosted productivity and allowed for a 100% remote work environment. Before 8x8, our phone system was more expensive and had fewer features, and it made employees dependent upon sending mass amounts of emails to each other for the simple task of ending a link or a message. The call queues and loops have made it easy for service and support departments to distribute calls evenly.
In my experience, App features are buggy and confusing, and they often don't match the descriptions and screenshots in their documentation. In fact, many of their help links go to 404 "page not found" errors. In my experience, there are frequent outages and quality issues. My customers prefer to talk to me on a different line, because they find it difficult to understand me on OpenPhone.
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
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.
We have had multiple negative experiences with our chat support, which has been non-responsive or failed to function as intended. In a particular incident, we encountered difficulty in receiving calls from a support call center, as it was unable to connect with our phones. Following several hours of back and forth, we were forced to resort to having them call our cell phone, but the issue remained unresolved. Even our 8x8 representative confirmed that they were aware of the inadequacies of their support service. I don't know if they provide varying levels of support to their larger clientele; however, our experience has consistently been subpar.
In my experience, their support feels like the opposite of support. They send you in circles, never directly answer questions, provide vague suggestions with unwanted platitudes, and they often take days between responses to provide that. For me, it's a frustrating experience that leaves you with a net loss of time and energy versus before you reached out to them. In my opinion, you definitely don't get "support".
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.
As stated earlier, one major advantage was support for older equipment that other providers could not guarantee or were incompatible. 8x8 Work also seems to cater to our size and type of company where our call center is key to customer satisfaction and delivery. The deep level of customization on profiles and lines, ingratiation with our SSO/SAML tools, and dedicated rep to assist along the way, helped us decide on 8x8 Work for our organization.
OpenPhone has an easier user interface than Grasshopper. Years ago when I was using Grasshopper, I recall that their user interface looked antiquated and full of complications. They would also update the interface just as everyone was getting used to using it. OpenPhone has many more functions. Grasshopper's app did not offer basic functions such as in-app texting between team members, and its call transfer function was incredibly complicated to use. In my opinion, Grasshopper was an inferior service/product in almost every way.
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.
In my experience, Billing lacks transparency, and they have made billing errors (overcharging me) since I started using them. I think the "trust registration" is an insane ripoff charging around $20 for every attempt. Crazy.
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.
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.
