The Challenge: Modernizing communications across clients
Solvd. was looking to move to a new communications platform as its existing solution, 8x8’s Easycontact Now, was being retired. While the team had an open mind about which platform and tools they would move to as they modernized, they considered high availability, 24/7 communications to be at the center of their delivery model and critical to their service offerings.
The Solvd. team had several requirements for their next communications solution, including:
- Agility, scalability, integration, reporting, and a strong roadmap of investment
- High availability, 24/7 service
- Strong integration with their CRM system
- Maximum flexibility to deal with variations in call numbers, with the potential to grow as business use cases expanded
However, the most significant requirement was that Solvd.’s client, Transport UK, needed the option for concurrent users instead of named users. A named system model would have been incredibly expensive.
The new solution also needed to be delivered promptly and efficiently. According to Solvd.: “The cycles of change are so short now that we don’t have the luxury of being able to take months and months to plan and set everything up.”
With these challenges in mind, the highly experienced team at Solvd. evaluated 8x8 Voice plus 8x8 Contact Center, Ring Central, Orbtalk, and Vonage to see which could best meet their needs in the contact center.
The Solution: 24/7 reliability, seamless integration, easy access to data
8x8 won out in the review process on a number of fronts. Most important was the platform’s ability to deliver concurrent licensing instead of named agent licenses. For Solvd.’s services, this was a crucial element because Solvd. operates seven days a week with a mixture of part-time and full-time staff across 24 hours a day.
Additionally, 8x8’s Salesforce integration worked well with Solvd.’s CRM needs, delivering a key benefit, according to Geraghty: “The ability to integrate with our Salesforce CRM is good, and it's pretty seamless in terms of how it operates. Because in the contact center, we're operating a blended model with multiskilled teams handling voice and digital customer requests, it must be agile in the sense that we're taking inquiries for different clients.”
Another decision factor was access to data. The analytics and data available via the 8x8 APIs could feed into a wide range of additional reports that Solvd. could then use as part of its service offering to clients, something that would not have been possible with a non-cloud solution.
Solvd. also tested 8x8’s service across a wide range of scenarios due to the unpredictable nature of the transportation sector, including disaster recovery, business continuity, and flexible working.
The Results: A modern way of working and a modern contact center
With the licensing benefit and Salesforce integration, 8x8 has allowed Solvd. to run a modern contact center on behalf of their clients.
If the company were operating a classic contact center, with the traditional dedicated agent model rather than a blended model, Solvd. would be facing a scenario where workloads may not be evenly distributed, with some staff having a too-quiet or too-busy shift. Instead, the 8x8 platform allows for a more elegant and efficient way of working across the contact center.
8x8 also enables easy onboarding of new staff and clients as they occur, allowing people and organizations to hit the ground running and deliver an optimized customer and employee experience.
The team at Solvd. has been thoroughly impressed with 8x8. “Not all platforms are good at dealing with the blended contact center model, and it’s a very cost-effective, cloud platform solution with accessible support,” says Geraghty. To further improve the customer and agent experience, they plan to evaluate the latest 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant features.
