Sweetwater Sound’s success with 8x8 is music to our ears

The Challenge: An expensive, outage-prone PBX

With over 3,000 employees on site each day, including 700+ sales engineers, it’s critical for Sweetwater Sound to have a top-notch communications system. As a leading music retailer, the company is a well-oiled machine, but its aging on-premises system wasn’t meeting the company’s standards.

For approximately 10 years, Sweetwater Sound was using a Mitel PBX system, which was causing the IT team some serious grief. “It was frustrating,” says Dean Ward, VoIP Engineer at Sweetwater. “There were a lot of late nights rebooting the servers or troubleshooting issues that we didn’t have any support for.” And this wasn’t just a problem for Ward’s team, it was becoming a problem for their customers, too.

“It caused some challenges for our department,” explained Ward. “With the old phone system we experienced outages or we had to reboot the system, which was frustrating and not up to our standards.”

Knowing it was time to make a change, Sweetwater worked with Converged Technology Professionals, a technology-based consulting firm, to evaluate different communications options. In the end, the team chose 8x8 to breathe new life into their communications and future-proof their business. The decision came down to 8x8’s excellent call quality, but the team also cited 8x8’s dedicated team, intelligent call reporting, and advanced APIs as the main reasons they chose 8x8.

The Solution: 8x8 “knocked it out of the park”

”We interact with 30,000 customers a day over the phone, and it’s very important to us that the experience is a good one,” says JP Eagleson, Vice President of IT at Sweetwater. “8x8 had the best call quality of any providers we looked at.”

When Sweetwater’s team began the process of migrating to 8x8, the first order of business was to get the customer operations department up and running. Currently, about 40% of the rest of the company is set up with 8x8 Work for its internal communications, with plans to be fully migrated before long.

The migration process was smooth and efficient for Sweetwater, and any time the company had questions, 8x8’s staff was ready and eager to help.

“In the beginning, we had some questions for 8x8 support,” says Ward. “We escalated those, and 8x8 has done wonders. Our account manager answered all our questions and even helped us find all of the APIs that we need and got set up with those. He just knocked it out of the park.”

“8x8 allows us to be more customer-obsessed,” says Chris Caldwell, IT Communications Manager at Sweetwater. “It gives our employees the ability to be much more connected with each other and with our customers, without being tied to their desks.”

The Result: Dynamic, flexible, and efficient

Previously, Sweetwater had over a dozen on-premises servers that were error-prone, difficult to manage, and becoming increasingly expensive. “8x8 allowed us to eliminate a lot of the on-prem equipment that required reboots and maintenance, which interrupted or disrupted people's work day,” says Caldwell. Now with 8x8, the company has a dynamic communications provider that allows its staff to take calls on the move, which is especially important considering the company’s many departments spread across its massive campus.

When it comes to keeping things smooth and efficient, having everything on one platform has been a boon for Sweetwater. “The greatest impact to our organization from migrating to 8x8 has been the ability to have a single platform for all our communications,” says Ward.

By ensuring that communications are dynamic, flexible, and efficient, 8x8 allows Sweetwater to focus on continuing to provide exceptional customer support. “We share our passion for music with our customers, and a big part of that is ensuring that all of our customers have the opportunity to get what they need to be successful and achieve their musical dreams,” says Ward. “Whether we’re communicating via email, phone, or in person, we want to offer the same excellent experience every time, on all platforms.”