8x8 Contact Center vs. Zendesk Talk

IMO, 8x8 is great in the mid-market space. Contact Centers with 25-1000 seats. Is it perfect? No, but none of them are (Ring, Nice, Five9, Talk) they're all going to have their defects. If you're a small or micro business, I don't know if If 8x8 is the place to be. Functionally, it will work fine, but the ROI isn't good for that sized org. And, you want get the support the same way the Mid and Enterprise customers will. Another things to consider is integrations - of which, 8x8 has many. Integrations and APIs is an areas where I have really seen 8x8 making a big push in the last few years. They have a powerful CPaaS product too, but I've not used it enough to be qualified to comment on it (yet).

Incentivized

Zendesk Talk is a great partner that helps us in the customer care area by managing every type of contact with customers (both phone calls and emails). I know there is also the possibility to have integration with instant messaging apps (like messenger and WhatsApp but I have never used them in my experience). In my opinion, the best scenario for Zendesk Talk is represented by a context with a high amount of contacts/requests where a unique platform could be a help both on the external side (customers) and on the internal side (a lot of colleagues who are working in the same area and have to work in a coordinate way). For customers, they could benefit from tailor-made answers, also based on past contacts for the same topic, and avoid waiting times during phone calls, with an immediate follow-up. For internal work management, operators don't overlap in a single request, and even if the same operator is not available the one who manages the request later has complete visibility of the entire topic from the historical point of view. Last but not least, I think that Zendesk Talk helps a lot in the context in which the request's speed is a KPI to manage constantly.

Incentivized

• Tracks all inbound and outbound calls from our organization.
• Gives us the ability to record and review calls.
• Gives the user the ability to receive phone call either via computer, cell phone, or polycom phone when in-house - all received from the same static number/extension.

Incentivized

• Call recording is a nice feature! It is great for training purposes and for quality assurance.
• The metrics you get from Explore are a great insight into how the team is handling the call volumes.
• Zendesk Talk has met most of our needs. It can be a bit unreliable at times.

Incentivized

• Post-sale support through the online ticket system is painfully slow.
• It's hard to get in contact with people for license help and understanding why phone numbers are not properly distributed in your account. i.e. Our account has 48 free local numbers and we had to purchase 120 additional numbers. But for some reason only 25 of the 48 free numbers are being utilized, and there's no good way in the Admin UI to see which numbers are which, or reallocate paid numbers into those 'free' slots.
• The system has bugs which pop up from time to time such as when a user uses the 'Do Not Disturb' option in their app or on their phone - it does not always turn off on the back-end of the system, even though the phone or app shows the user as available. This causes inbound phone calls to be routed directly to Voicemail, and the only notice the user has is when someone reaches out by other means to say "Why is your phone going directly to voicemail?" - which initiates a service ticket for IT who cannot see this in the admin center. And unless 'flipping' DND on then off again fixes it, it requires a ticket with 8x8 which is, as mentioned before, slow.

Incentivized

• The lag on the phone is by far the most annoying thing with Zendesk talk due to the voice over IP.
• Using the Reporting feature in Zendesk has never been a walk in the park. We have to customize a lot of fields and when something doesn't seem to add up, it at times feels like pulling teeth to get to the final answer of what went wrong.

Incentivized

8 x 8 is not an ordinary system, it works well for everyday business and assists in working efficiencies. So much is required for credentialing and re-credentialing. 8 x 8 takes out a lot of the extra steps by providing smarter working features that saves time and money. Also, when faxing, once the fax is complete, you receive an actual confirmation! Absolutely love this feature.

Incentivized

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

Everything about it works, as I have previously detailed. Coming from different companies and using other tools like Twilio or Aircall, those are VOIP tools that are built to be plugged into other tools, Zendesk Talk is natively built into Zendesk and feels correct in the user experience of Zendesk

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

Incentivized

Yes everything loads quickly and its ready for use

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

In our experience, we have had to go through many support people then ultimately getting frustrated enough to go directly to our point of contact who then doesn't always seem to be able to assist. We tend to get the support we need when it is escalated up to me and I reach out to our point of a contact person to express our frustration.

Incentivized

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.

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

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 prefer 8x8; it has the right number of features and modes for the communication I need. I much prefer 8x8 meetings to Zoom meetings, as it is much, much easier to transition between devices when I am on the road. 8x8 is also easier to manage across multiple modes of communication.

Incentivized

Slack and Zoom phones cannot compare because they have no ticketing systems. Zendesk Talk was the only option we considered because we were already using Zendesk for our email ticketing with customer concerns. We then expanded to using Zendesk's chatbot and then the Zendesk Talk system to keep it all integrated and streamlined.

Incentivized

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

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

• We were able to reduce global headcount by 20% in our call centers.
• Allowing customers to leave voicemails creates the personal touch needed and really increases our customer connectivity score. We saw increases in our CSAT scores after the implementation of this solution.
• Call handling time and case reopen rates both decreased. Y/y it decreased 18% and 60%.

Incentivized