8x8 Work vs. Lumen Next-Gen Voice

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 don't like for outside clients to know my direct line, so I would like to be able to mask my number in outgoing texts/display our general reception number so that those clients are not confused on how best to call in to me.

Incentivized

[CenturyLink Enterprise Voice SIP is] good for environments that require tried and true SIP services, where high-quality voice is a requirement, and backed by a large, global company, with global footprint. CenturyLink voice is also well-suited to environments that want to use MPLS to interconnect their offices, as the same voice circuits can be used for data as well; however, the circuits are relatively expensive, even as far as MPLS goes, and watch out for Lumen's "fees" that often aren't included when you see their quote. Also beware if you require a rapid turn-up or have a very small or inexperienced staff, as MPLS with BGP deployments are great once they're up and running, but can be complex to design and implement.

Incentivized

• Direct calls to the extensions.
• Callers were able to either talk to our individual staff members or leave a message.
• We loved having a record of every single call that came in for CRM purposes.
• We loved being able to collect our messages from the console.

Incentivized

• Reliable service
• Supports wide range of key features
• They do have high levels of support where you can receive real answers

Incentivized

• The auto attendant has built in text-to-speech, but this same engine should be put to use for individual and ring group voicemail messages.
• Call forwarding in the mobile app should be relocated for easier access. Instead it's buried somewhere under the generic "account settings"
• The default user template disables voicemail text transcription. Why???
• One fax number should be accessible by app for more than 1 user. Responsibility for faxes is usually distributed among a few people in a typical small office setting.
• Ability to receive and send SMS messages from a shared "main company number" would be awesome. Ability to assign this to certain users would rock!

Incentivized

• Lumen-Centurylink has suffered from many noticeable outages in the last few years - this is a blow to their reputation that they still have to recover from.
• Lumen-CenturyLink does not peer well enough with OTHER carriers - they depend on their own network to give you SIP, which means less true redundancy.
• Lumen-CenturyLink needs a better customer portal/interface to handle failover, see the real-time status, etc.

Incentivized

Everyone at the company now have the experiance needed to make phone calls, meetings, video conferencing. It's easy to use is unmatched in the industry. It's been a solid product throughout. The phone tree was easy to setup with the implementation team and they guided us throughout the process

Incentivized

I'm not using it to its full capacity like a Zoom or teams Workspace. I use the service for phone calls, hate application on my cellphone and the voicemail apparatus. This we like because it gives us the feel of a large firm when we aren't.

Incentivized

In the time I have used 8x8 Virtual Office, the core system has been up and running almost flawlessly though we do have a slight performance degradation from time to time as is expected of cloud software. The one recurring issue for us is that the fax connection is not always functional for outbound messages. We usually have to retry three or four times to get the fax to connect reliably to the destination machine. Once connected, it's smooth sailing.

Incentivized

No problems with performance, Pages load as they should. I can't answer on the reports side as only a handful of our Admins ( call center ) currently use that side of the software. It does intergrate very well with Office for meetings and conferences. Sometimes there is a slight lag or static when users are talking, but we found this to be a cause of a users computer had not restarted in a while, Once the user restarts thier computer the problem is resolved, So this is not an issue with 8x8

Incentivized

We are a USA based organization. Support was refreshingly quick (callback via phone or email, online live agents). Agents are knowledgeable, thorough in their explanations, and extremely patient when dealing with end-users at various levels of the ICT knowledge spectrum.

Incentivized

SIP service support is definitely improving. A few years ago I would have rated them a 2. Now a 7. But, Lumen still needs a better portal experience to report and see a real-time status. Also to manage SIP failover functions in a WYSIWIG/GUI interface. When Lumen's network breaks in a larger outage, there are long hold times and support is not good.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

Good and Simple Training Module, also Certification is available.

Incentivized

We had a third party implement and set up the system the way we wanted it - after that I do all changes or additions. The vendor was very knowledgeable and had it up and running in less than an hour.

Incentivized

8x8 Work offers all we need in an easy-to-use format. Zoom seemed to have too many features that are not required and can be overwhelming to Users who are not the most Tech-Savvy. The price point of 8x8 is great, too. Get everything we need at a low cost.

Incentivized

I have found a better solution is to run two different carriers through SD-WAN (such as Bigleaf or Velocloud MSR) and use a provider like BCMOne (formerly NexVortex) to manage the SIP. BCMOne/Nexvortex is an AWESOME SIP provider with better planning, deployment, and technical support. When paired with redundant internet paths on SD-WAN (BigLeaf or Velocloud) a very resilient solution is created.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Moving to 8x8 Work helped us consolidate our soft phone and IVR needs with our contact center platform and save thousands in the first year alone.
• All of the 8x8 Work products I've worked with have great integration options from CRMs like Zoho/Salesforce to Google and Microsoft Office.

Incentivized

• Faster learning
• Increased numbers of calls
• Organization of calls

Incentivized