1. Competitive Battle Card: 8x8
A quick reference guide to help you sell against the 8X8 Virtual Office (April 8, 2017)
8x8 Company Overview
Founded: 1987
Presence: Data centers in US, Canada, UK, Netherlands, Brazil, Singapore, Australia & Hong Kong. Supports local numbers in 80, & toll free numbers in 120 countries.
Target Market: Primarily SMB market, trying to move upmarket but struggling in achieving scale
Product: Virtual Office, VO Professional, Fax, Virtual Contact Center
Accounts: >50k customers, average customer size ~10
Strategy: “World’s First Communications Cloud”. Creating hype with their UC + CC offerings. Swaying from one vendor approach with Sameroom.io acquisition, aiming to federate multiple team collaboration applications.
Pricing: Virtual Office $30 (no web conferencing, faxing or recording), Virtual Office Pro $50, both with unlimited minutes
8x8 – Strength & Weaknesses
Strengths:
Rich set of UC and contact center capabilities at a competitive price.
Many 8x8 users leverage a broad mix of UC functions, VoIP, UM, mobility, IM and presence. Fax included. Out-of-the-box CRM integrations
Ability to support international offices
Internally investing into their team collaboration service
Weaknesses:
Scalability issues. No cross-platform integrations – an instance per region of operation. An instance per ~300 CC agents required
Poor call quality and reliability. Customers use words like “nightmare” and “headache.”
8x8's contact center and UCaaS solutions poorly integrated, require parallel user sign-ons and separate clients
Limited APIs and enterprise productivity integrations
Sameroom.io federation service has numerous usability limitations
Positioning & Objection handling against 8x8:
Quality and Reliability
Issue: Users report low reliability, poor call quality and dismal customer service. Frequent outages leads to questioning redundancy. Lack of advanced reporting features.
Impact: Creates customer churn, issues for high-growth customers with global footprint.
With BroadSoft: BroadSoft offers the market’s most robust hosted systems that power the World’s largest organizations – nationally and globally.
Price & Packaging
Issue: Pricing is a-la-carte for different features with Virtual Office and hidden extra costs for Virtual Contact Center. Additional charges for new setup and early termination fees. Users report unpredictable price hikes (over 100%).
Impact: Complicates budgeting and extends deployment cycles. “Awkward to use add-ons”
With BroadSoft: BroadSoft sells through service providers and assures a full featured experience and straightforward pricing.
Scalability
Issue 1: Need an instance per region, but with no cross-platform integration.
Issue 2: Need an instance per ~300 agents per tenant.
Impact 1: Manual integrations per instances. Only calls are federated, not even presence federation
Impact 2: Not scalable for larger CC deployments
With BroadSoft: True enterprise grade, scalable, multi-tenant experience with integrated UC & CC experience.
Ecosystem and APIs
Issue: 8x8 does not have any APIs with Virtual Office
Impact: Customers on their own for all integrations
Contact Center
Issue: 8x8's cloud contact center and UCaaS solutions are not fully integrated, require parallel sigh- ups and multiple clients
Impact: Integration issues impact call center productivity.