Voice for Microsoft Teams Hits Global Milestone

8×8 have announced rapid adoption of their Voice for Microsoft Teams solution, surpassing more than 100,000 business users globally.

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

“As organizations increase their usage of Microsoft Teams, 8×8 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,” said Dave Michels, founder and principal analyst at TalkingPointz.

“For organizations relying on Teams that require enhanced communications and customer engagement capabilities, 8×8 offers a unique solution with its integrated global telephony and contact centre solution.”

In a study commissioned by 8×8, Hanover Research found that 80 percent of respondents said their organizations are likely to integrate Microsoft Teams with third-party telephony providers.

8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams helps organizations 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: 8×8 contact centre 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 Organization With 8×8 Presence Sync: The presence status of Teams-based users is updated in real time, and is visible in 8×8 Work and 8×8 contact centre.
• Expanded Global Reach: With the addition of Japan, Russia, and Puerto Rico, 8×8 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 8×8 eXperience Communications Platform, 8×8 offers the highest levels of reliability and the industry’s 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 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams app, available for download at the Microsoft AppSource.
• Integrated Business Messaging: Provides an organization’s 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,” said Dave Reed, Project Manager at The Plus Group.

“8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams will allow our employees to communicate globally using the familiar Teams interface in tandem with 8×8’s functionality, support, and reliability on the back end.”

8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams is a core component of 8×8 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. Organizations who recently signed and deployed 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams include:

• A global biopharmaceutical company sought a single vendor communication platform with Microsoft Teams integration. They selected 8×8 XCaaS with 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams to improve employee and customer experience for 1,200 employees and 30 contact centre agents.
• Archway Marketing Services, selected 8×8 XCaaS and 8×8 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 8×8 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 8×8 UCaaS and 8×8 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 organizations extend the value of Teams by adding advanced communications and customer engagement features directly from any Teams endpoint,” said Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, Inc.

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

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of 8x8 – View the Original Article

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