8x8 Contact Center vs. Salesforce Service Cloud

8x8 Work is an ideal communication platform for intra-organization communication; it is very easy to find any employee at my firm and quickly ascertain their availability. I prefer not to share my direct line with outside clients, so I would like to be able to mask my number in outgoing texts/display our general reception number, ensuring those clients are not confused about how to reach me.

Incentivized

It is a helpful tool, but it can be a bit cumbersome to manage. It is also a bit expensive, but we already use CRM for Salesforce and it is convenient to be able to immediately tag contacts and accounts when the tickets come into the system and tie them directly to the account. I do know an integration with Jira is possible (we use Jira internally for our engineering team to escalate issues) but it is not configured right now so managing the connection between support tickets and Jira tickets is manual and hard to keep up with

Incentivized

• The out of the box chat feature is outstanding for your website. My team was able to adopt chat easily.
• Setting up the system with the help of an integrator was especially easy and did not require any IT training on my part.
• The visibility of being able to manage my team and all media channels in one panel is awesome.

Incentivized

• Allows us to make changes quickly and with relative ease
• Can be flexible enough to use among several teams who do very different work
• Salesforce in general provides SO much training that anyone on the team can skill up and help maintain the system

Incentivized

• Support has always been a less than stellar area.
• There's a few feature gaps that have been called out for years that haven't been addressed yet. I.e. passing calls from UC to CC requires a phone number (like why?)
• Another frequent complaint I get is "why can't I just completely shut off a user's voicemail". You can fiddle with call forwarding rules, but sooner or later, an errant call finds a way to end up there.

Incentivized

• There is a slight scope for error, but sometimes it has a heavy impact. So this can be improved.
• Costing is high.
• Maintenance is more.
• Expertise is required for implementation.
• The number of communication messages have some limit per organisation account.

Incentivized

8x8 contact center is meeting our needs as a call center communication solution. We use 8x8 across the entire organization and have been able to work with our account management team to ensure our configuration and integrations meet our business, legal & compliance needs across the organization. The greatest benefit has been the 8x8 account management team who consistently works with us to ensure our needs are being met.

Incentivized

Professional edition works best for a small company with lower call volumes and is very useful but as you grow exponetially I think it has limited ability to do all the things we want to - SLA management, defect, release management to name a few. Reports and dashboards being available in real time.

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!!

Incentivized

I had Salesforce experience prior to using Service Cloud which made it a little easier to learn and navigate, but overall my team (some who had no Salesforce experience) caught on very quickly and found Service Cloud to be easy to use.

Incentivized

The only issue I have ran across was on getting the updated new version

Incentivized

Salesforce's Trust Center clearly communicates occasional issues to anyone who subscribes, down to an organization's cloud instance. Bundled sandboxes ease updates, and seasonal upgrades are seamless, scheduled well in advance with plenty of information about what's coming. Support agents have noticed intermittent Omni-Channel disconnects due to internet connections, and these are clearly notified.

Yes everything loads quickly and its ready for use

The Salesforce Service Cloud generally has very good performance, however the overall new Lightning user experience can bring that down. For example, if you have too many tabs open, then it can take a while for the Lightning UI to load. This UI is probably not well equipped to handle loading of all of that information at once, but Users tend to leave their tabs open all day long. It can also be fickle depending on which browser you use, what extensions you have installed, and whether you've cleared your cache. This can be the downfall with any software as a service though, not just Salesforce

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Salesforce offers support, although it generally gets routed to overseas support teams first, and once they are unable to help, it gets escalated up the chain to higher tiers. Frequently, the answer back from support is that there is no native solution, and we either have to turn to the AppExchange for some solution provided by another developer, or custom build our own solution.

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.

Our in-person training was provided by our implementation partner and it was quite good. This was in part because we were already working with them and so it naturally leant itself to a good training relationship. And because they were building our customizations and configuring things, they could then provide training on those things naturally.

Incentivized

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

Trailheads are great but it was often unclear what actually applied to our organization. This made it difficult to get a whole lot out of it. Part of it is that because the basic Salesforce features didn't quite work for us, we had to add customizations, which then nullified a lot of the training.

Incentivized

The transition from Mitel to 8 x 8 was smooth and no "hiccups". The support was one of the best that we had received. No surprises except what 8 x 8 is actually capable of doing! Support remained available throughout the transition! Co-workers were amazed at what they were able to do with having 8 x 8,

Incentivized

I would go through an implementation very differently knowing what I know now. It was difficult coming from systems we liked in post-sales service and having to adapt to the clunky and underwhelming feature set in Salesforce. I would trim back our expectations

Incentivized

I would say they are all very comparable. The one advantage to the Spectrum Enterprise OnDemand would be that it has it own internet bandwidth, so it doesn't eat into our overall internet usage bandwidth. It is however more expensive than 8x8. Poly Series just didn't have the flexibility and extensive features offered by 8x8, and therefore was not an acceptable replacement.

Incentivized

Salesforce service cloud is more configurable than Zendesk and Freshdesk. It has its own inbuilt AI chatbot also which further improves service agent efficiency. Salesforce is more integration agnostic and has pre-built connectors with multiple 3rd party systems. However, in terms of pricing it is priced at a premium compared to the other solutions

It is pretty much "Par for the course" with the options out there with other vendors.

It was implemented across the board in the company and has worked perfectly

Incentivized

The product has scaled up with our company growth just fine. No issues here other than slowness in clicking around and running reports

Incentivized

• The callback queue was a big thing for a while. Still is to a point but we would have MANY duplicate callbacks & it was frustrating to both the customer & the agent.
• Support is my biggest negative for 8x8 Contact Center. Being able to communicate with someone is essential yet having MANY support agents have a language barrier has made it difficult on both ends to get things addressed/taken care of. Being able to follow the requests of the ticket is a big one as well. I talked about both of these points before, but if I request to communicate via email 9/10 times, I am being called to talk about the problem when it could have been an email. They also request information MANY many times that seems to be useless when I have provided what I think to be all the necessary information. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It has been a little bit since I have had to put anything in for support the last one I did it was substantially better so hopefully that continues.
• Being able to work solely on 8x8 work or 8x8 Contact Center would be a HUGE plus for agents & IT. I see other platforms that are able to do this, if 8x8 was able to do this it would make it 100x better for us so we don't have to work out of two things for an agent to be able to work.
• The last thing is the plans. Not offering an unlimited talking plan to me seems very weird. What we are paying for & the amount of minutes that agents are using doesn't make a lot of sense on a billing standpoint. Offering better pricing/unlimited plans for enterprise like other companies would be a HUGE plus as well.

Incentivized

• Because this is a cloud service, the security, implementation framework and feature list is very mature and you don't have to develop these during implementation.
• The larger the implementation programme the better the licensing arrangements
• Free developer toolkit for proof of concepts or showcasing features
• Limited to annual subscription model

Incentivized