May 12, 2020
Q&A
Question: What is a good alternative to RingCentral?
Answer: Business consumers have plenty of options when it comes to choosing a cloud based phone system.
You already know this by looking at the various responses just in this question alone.
To add to this discussion, 8x8 deserves a good look as a reliable option to consider.
Here's a few thoughts on my experience as a subscriber.
Features
For someone who's worked on phone systems the majority of my career, what prompted me to choose 8x8 was how well the features work together.
As an example, moving from a one on one chat session and then turning that into a video meeting doesn't require separate app.
It's those details that 8x8 has done well that impresses me.
Scale
Regardless if you have a handful of phones or a couple thousand devices across multiple countries, I like how 8x8 can handle it.
With the X Series platform (which offers voice, video, chat and contact center) an organization choose from a mix of capabilities depending on the use case.
If you have a group of sales agents in a contact center, they can be given a different feature set specific to their job function while the rest of the office uses features more general in nature.
It's always good to have choice.
Reliability
This is a big one for me. Having a cloud based system is already a benefit as it inherently provides business continuity on behalf of it's clients.
Then consider 8x8 has a data center across various countries around the globe.
As along time phone guy, having access to this level of reliability was unheard of just a few decades ago.
So if any issues with the service comes up, I'm checking my stuff locally first before assuming it's an issue with 8x8.
Since getting into 8x8's cloud based communication service, I've had little reasons to consider switching.
The features continue to expand as the company grows.
I'm really excited to see what comes from their recent Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) acquisition over the next 18-24 months.
Those are my thoughts and experience with 8x8. Hope this helps.