New Capabilities Enable Large Meeting Moderation and Engagement; Enhance Employee and Customer Experience

8x8, Inc. (NYSE: EGHT), a leading integrated cloud communications platform, today announced new 8x8 XCaaS™ (eXperience Communications as a Service™) enhancements, including advanced enterprise features to optimize the moderation, performance monitoring, and participant engagement of large meetings, expanded global reach, and additional customer engagement features. These improved capabilities enable organizations to boost productivity, provide tailored experiences for a distributed workforce, and increase customer satisfaction, allowing for a more agile business.

“When we became a cloud-first organization, we wanted all voice services on a single platform. 8x8 XCaaS fit the bill and gave us everything we previously had with our on-premises systems, plus so much more,” said Tom Drez, Chief Information Officer at Christian Brothers Services. “The ability, now, for all employees to have their own fully featured virtual meeting space to conduct meetings from small to large with employees and non-employees alike – with frequent software updates and new features from 8x8 – has proven just how valuable it is to choose a technology partner who is going to continue driving innovation to meet our current and future needs.”

8x8 XCaaS includes integrated cloud contact center, voice, team chat, video meetings, and CPaaS APIs and embeddable apps capabilities in a single-vendor solution. 8x8 XCaaS is built on the resilient, secure, and compliant 8x8 eXperience Communications Platform™, which offers the highest levels of reliability and the industry’s only financially backed, platform-wide 99.999 percent SLA across an integrated cloud UCaaS and CCaaS solution.

New 8x8 XCaaS features enhance company-wide collaboration to boost employee and customer experience, including:

Work

• Advanced moderation features: Addresses the needs of a hybrid work environment by enabling advanced enterprise capabilities to manage and moderate large meetings, such as company or department-wide town halls and classroom sessions. Includes the ability to mute and turn off video for all participants, and disable content sharing to run effective meetings.
• Meet from anywhere: Satisfies the needs of a mobile and distributed workforce and allows for increased meeting engagement from any location or device. 8x8 Work now supports 500 active participants across desktop and mobile apps, web browser, and audio dial-in. 8x8 Work users can also seamlessly switch from one device to another with just a click without leaving the meeting.
• Real-time in-meeting interactions: Keeps a pulse on meetings and enhances participant engagement using in-meeting polls to elicit real-time feedback, and leverages emoji reactions for non-verbal cues, such as hand claps, thumbs up, and more.
• Meeting analytics: Streamlines system management and offers real-time metrics and actionable insights to IT teams on meetings performance, powered by 8x8 callstats.
• Enhanced receptionist functionality: 8x8 Frontdesk, a new 8x8 XCaaS composed experience for high volume call handling, transforms the receptionist role by delivering a tailored experience and user interface that is natively enabled within the 8x8 Work app. This eliminates the need for additional applications to install or support, and also removes any dependency on additional third-party solutions.
• Expanded Global Reach: With the addition of Japan, Russia, and Puerto Rico, 8x8 Global Reach™ now delivers full Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) replacement services to 46 countries and territories. This provides multinational organizations with access to in-country enterprise-grade PSTN connectivity, local direct inward dial (DID) numbers, global dialing plans, and emergency services.

Engage

• Recommended for Chrome Enterprise: 8x8 Contact Center is now a Google Chrome Enterprise Recommended product optimized for Chrome OS, making it easy for Chrome OS users to quickly deploy and manage end-to-end customer experiences.
• Interactive analytics and custom reporting: Enhanced analytics and reporting wizards within 8x8 Contact Center allow users to create, save, and share custom metrics for graphical display on everything from reports and wallboards to dashboards and widgets.
• Contextualized messaging: Provides agents improved visibility and insight when supporting customer queries. 8x8 Converse contextualizes recent interactions with customers, including messages sent via 8x8 Connect and APIs.

Extend

• Deeper integration with Microsoft Teams: 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams now empowers employees to capture, retain, and retrieve call recordings for training, compliance, and archive purposes from any Teams endpoint via the embedded 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams app, available for download at the Microsoft AppSource.
• Digital channel engagement with Microsoft Dynamics 365: Allows agents to communicate with customers across a wide array of messaging apps, including SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Kakaotalk, Zalo, and Viber from Microsoft Dynamic 365’s Omnichannel for Customer Service.

“For many organizations, the future of work involves a hybrid model that allows employees the opportunity to work from home or in the office, depending on factors such as day of the week, team collaboration activities, or participation in all-hands meetings. As a result, video conferencing remains critical or important to 85% of nearly 400 global organizations that participated in a recent research study on UC management and endpoints,” said Irwin Lazar, President & Principal Analyst at Metrigy. “This continued reliance on video as part of business operations places an imperative on the availability of high-quality video services and the ability to monitor and manage performance with ease.”

“As organizations shift to a hybrid and distributed workforce model, they understand the importance of continually evolving and improving company-wide collaboration and communication capabilities,” said Rob Pilgrim, Global Vice President of Product Management at 8x8, Inc. “We continue to innovate and advance 8x8 XCaaS as we help organizations move forward and optimize their workplace communications to drive productivity and employee and customer engagement.”

Visit 8x8.com to learn about the latest 8x8 XCaaS enhancements and watch the on-demand webinar.

About 8x8, Inc.

8x8, Inc. (NYSE: EGHT) is transforming the future of business communications as a leading Software-as-a-Service provider of 8x8 XCaaS, an integrated contact center, voice communications, video, chat and API solution built on one global cloud communications platform. 8x8 is powering all employees globally to connect individuals and teams so they can collaborate faster and work smarter. Real-time business analytics and intelligence provide businesses unique insights across all interactions and channels so they can delight end-customers and accelerate their business. For additional information, visit www.8x8.com, or follow 8x8 on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

8x8®, 8x8 X Series™, 8x8 XCaaS™, eXperience Communications as a Service™, and 8x8 Global Reach™ are trademarks of 8x8, Inc.

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