Global adoption of 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams surpasses 100,000 users

Integrated cloud communications platform 8x8 has announced rapid adoption of its voice for Microsoft Teams solution, surpassing more than 100,000 business users globally.

The 8x8 direct routing solution provides organisations adopting Teams with enterprise-grade global telephony and other capabilities, further extending the Teams experience to enhance employee and customer experience. 8x8 also announced the latest 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams enhancements, including call recordings and presence sync.

"As organisations increase their usage of Microsoft Teams, 8x8 is delivering differentiated capabilities with its Voice for Microsoft Teams solution, such as new integrated features and expanded global reach for users in countries such as China, Russia, and Japan," says Dave Michels, founder and principal analyst at TalkingPointz.

"For organisations relying on Teams that require enhanced communications and customer engagement capabilities, 8x8 offers a unique solution with its integrated global telephony and contact centre solution," he says.

In a study commissioned by 8x8, Hanover Research found that 80 percent of respondents said their organisations are likely to integrate Microsoft Teams with third-party telephony providers. 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams helps organisations shift to hybrid work by expanding Teams into an advanced communications, collaboration, and engagement hub.

The latest enhancements include:

• Connect Every Agent and Employee for Faster Customer Resolution: 8x8 Contact Center for Microsoft Teams, which is certified by Microsoft, allows sales, service, and support agents to quickly connect and collaborate with other Teams-enabled experts to resolve issues faster.
• Visibility Across the Organisation with 8x8 Presence Sync: The presence status of Teams-based users is updated in real time, and is visible in 8x8 Work and 8x8 Contact Center.
• Expanded Global Reach: With the addition of Japan, Russia and Puerto Rico, 8x8 Global Reach now delivers full Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) replacement services to 46 countries and territories.
• New Industry Standard for Reliability: Built on the resilient, secure, and compliant 8x8 eXperience Communications Platform, 8x8 offers the highest levels of reliability and the industrys only financially backed, platform-wide 99.999 percent uptime SLA across an integrated cloud UCaaS and CCaaS solution.
• Easy Access to Call Recordings: Empowers employees to capture, retain, and retrieve call recordings for training, compliance, and archive purposes from any Teams endpoint via the embedded 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams app, available for download at the Microsoft AppSource.
• Integrated Business Messaging: Provides an organisations hybrid workforce with individual business phone and fax numbers. This enables employees to conveniently send and receive SMS or MMS messages (US and Canada) or faxes (Globally) directly from any Teams native interface to further extend the experience for users.
   

"Previously, our ability to work remotely was severely hampered by legacy on-premises phone systems that required our employees to have access to their physical desk phones," says Dave Reed, project manager at The Plus Group.

"8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams will allow our employees to communicate globally using the familiar Teams interface in tandem with 8x8s functionality, support, and reliability on the back end."

8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams is a core component of 8x8 XCaaS (eXperience Communications as a Service), which includes fully integrated, cloud native contact centre, voice, team chat, video meetings, and CPaaS embeddable communications and APIs capabilities in a single-vendor solution.

Organisations who recently signed and deployed 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams include:

• A global biopharmaceutical company sought a single vendor communication platform with Microsoft Teams integration. They selected 8x8 XCaaS with 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams to improve employee and customer experience for 1,200 employees and 30 contact centre agents.
• Archway Marketing Services, selected 8x8 XCaaS and 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams to support their technology enhancement initiative after experiencing issues with their legacy on-premises systems. We quickly deployed the first of their 13 locations in 72 hours, and we will support 750 UCaaS and 70 CCaaS users.
• nVent, a high-performance electrical company, continues to add 8x8 XCaaS to more locations. They added more XCaaS and Microsoft Voice for Teams seats to support employees in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Germany, bringing their total global seat count to nearly 1,600.
• The Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner for Essex provides policing, fire, and rescue services for the County of Essex in the East of England and supports 1.8 million citizens. The Essex County Fire - Rescue Service selected 8x8 UCaaS and 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams to improve their communication capabilities across 50 fire stations and more than 1,400 members of staff.
   

"We are committed to helping organisations extend the value of Teams by adding advanced communications and customer engagement features directly from any Teams endpoint," says Hunter Middleton, chief product officer at 8x8.

"We continue to drive innovation with our 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams solution that goes far beyond direct routing, and we are seeing more and more organisations providing their distributed workforce with the ability to interact with colleagues and customers from anywhere using Teams."