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
Sangoma Asterisk
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Asterisk is an open source toolkit for building communications applications, now owned and supported by Sangoma (acquired with Digium in 2018). Most Asterisk-based systems and solutions require additional components (e.g. IP-phones, VoIP gateways or telephony interface cards, and other hardware), and expertise.
8x8 [X Series] was much easier to manage. For what 8x8 cost us in money, it saved us a lot of time. We were constantly having to mess with our open source PBX to get it to do what we wanted it to. Also, we had only one person on our team who really understood it.
Our industry is inherently mobile, so our team is always on the go. Being able to access all our office phone information and call customers and partners from an office line, rather than a personal cell phone, is helpful. Our crew can text a client who may not recognize the number calling to provide information about the delivery or event without disclosing personal contact info.
Digium Asterisk is well suited for a city government as a communications solution for internal and external use. Other options like PBX are more expensive and hard to escalate. VoIP makes it easier to use the communications infrastructure instead that already exists rather than having to wire every phone when the solution is a digital or analog phone. In my city, government offices are not in the same place, which makes it harder to communicate everything together.
Utilizing more "video bites"/ digestible on-demand video tutorials for new users of main aspects and features of the service (whether administrator level or end user features). The knowledge resource portal is great, but I've found the work force of this era tend not to be thrilled with copious amounts of reading. A deeper video library that folks can learn new things in "5 minute" bites (avoids those 30-45min webinars where most folks tune out after the first 10 minutes). This could help give users more individual control over the pace of their learning. It can also build trust and loyalty to a brand that focuses that bit more on expanding the options (beyond just reading web pages) of how users can become more comfortable and adept at navigating the 8x8 Work GUI (Mobile and DesktopWeb) ecosystem.
Allowing business clients to send group/batch SMS messages to their client base and contacts from within the 8x8 Work dashboard.
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.
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.
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.
Recently I've been using Vonage Business, and while it is far more expensive and a lot less configurable than Digium, the mobility is essential for my new role. Digium is ideal for a business with both a very technical staff and a user base that is not remote. Digium was selected due to price and ability to create custom applications.
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.
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.
