Earlier this month, 8×8 held its analyst summit at St. Mary’s Stadium, the home of the Southampton Football Club.
The venue proved a smart choice. After all, professional sports teams have the urgent goal of delivering more personalized experiences.
While this could be said for almost every company across every industry, this hasn’t traditionally been an area for sports teams, given the captive audience.
Yet, over the last few years, all sports teams – across all leagues – have focused on capturing more wallet share per fan.
This is particularly important in the Premier League, where the spending cap of a team is set as a percentage of a club’s revenue.
As a result, the better a team knows each fan, the more it can market to that person, creating a personalized experience.
Ultimately, that should lead to increased spend, freeing up more money to spend on the team – a circular win-win-win.
8×8 is one of the tech providers supporting Southampton FC’s mission to deliver this winning cycle.
Given it’s one of the smaller CX players, particularly of those that are publicly traded, 8×8 can’t rely on out-marketing others to win deals.
Instead, it has turned to focusing on customer simplicity. That is the first top takeaway from the 2025 8×8 Analyst Summit.
1. 8×8 Assumes Complexity on Its Customers’ Behalf
During his keynote, Sam Wilson, CEO of 8×8, called out the communications industry for lacking focus on vendor simplicity and customer complexity.
In doing so, he referred to the fact that vendors typically deliver software in silos and leave the integration up to the customer.
Instead, Wilson emphatically stated 8×8’s focus on assuming complexity for its customers and delivering a simpler customer experience.
As an example, every vendor talks about “selling business outcomes.” Still, that often doesn’t mean anything other than making it easier for the vendor to sell a bundle of products as a “suite” whether users want all the features or not.
Microsoft’s E3 and E5 License tiers are a great example of this. Many customers don’t need everything in the tiers but have to buy it all to get a few of the apps that they require.
Instead, 8×8 offers solutions such as “Remote Fix”, which includes products such as UCaaS + CCaaS + Video Elevation, and “Active Assessor”, comprised of UCaaS + CCaaS + ICA (intelligent customer assistant) and Analytics.
These solutions make it easy for the customer to buy exactly what they require to solve specific business problems, as 8×8 has taken on the burden of packaging the correct products – vendor complexity and customer simplicity.
2. 8×8 Expands Engage
At the event, 8×8 made several product announcements, each aimed at removing friction from business processes.
For starters, the vendor expanded its Engage tool so that any customer-facing employee – not just contact center agents – can connect with customers through their preferred channels.
Engage gives employees a complete, real-time view of each customer’s past interactions, preferences, and overall sentiment. That makes it easier for anyone to jump in and offer customer support, which feels personal and relevant.
With the update, Engage now has video and SMS capabilities. Also, integrations with Viber, WhatsApp, email, and Rich Communication Services (RCS) Business Messaging are coming soon.
3. 8×8 Embraces RCS
8×8’s Contact Center solution is also getting an RCS update.
Now, businesses can send rich, interactive content, such as images, videos, buttons, and real-time updates, directly to a customer’s messaging app.
8×8 is one of the first cloud contact center providers to offer native RCS support.
On top of that, 8×8 is offering RCS Business Messaging for more personalized, branded services. That means a customer asking about their order could get more than just a tracking number—they could see a live map, reschedule delivery with one tap, or even get a promo code for related products.
4. 8×8 Unveils an AI Orchestrator
Additionally, 8×8 rolled out another new tool that makes managing multiple AI bots from different vendors easier.
AI Orchestrator brings everything together into a unified workflow. That means bots can talk to each other, customer conversations stay on track, and if a handoff to a human agent is needed, it happens seamlessly.
The solution addresses a common problem where a conversation starts with one bot and suddenly switches to another because the tools don’t work together.
These tools are built on the 8×8 Platform for CX, which ties together the contact center, unified communications, and AI insights.
The idea is to give businesses the flexibility to grow and adapt to customer demands without adding complexity for their customer-facing teams.
5. 8×8’s Commitment to Customer Intimacy Wins It Deals
In addition to having Huw Fielding, IT Director at Southampton FC, 8×8 had a couple of other customers speak at the event.
In the Q&A with analysts, the customers were asked why they chose 8×8 to work with.
Instead of discussing the tech stack, all three mentioned 8×8’s commitment to customer intimacy, which won the deal.
The vendor took the time to fully understand the problems and help them meet their business goals.
Final Thoughts
Typically, in a market as crowded as CCaaS, it would be hard to give one of the smaller vendors, such as 8×8, anything more than a puncher’s chance of success.
However, 8×8 is an interesting position now. Much of the work integrating Fuze is complete, and the company can turn its sights toward execution.
CEO Wilson has instilled a culture of being customer-first and delivering on simplicity. Yet, being publicly traded, success will be measured in growth.
It’s tough to predict when the results will appear in the numbers, but when a vendor does what’s in the customer’s best interest, even if it creates more work, it generally leads to success.
What 8×8 showed at its St. Mary’s event was its willingness to do that work to ensure its customers achieve their goals.
