8×8 has introduced 8×8 Resolve, a mobile-first critical communications and incident management solution.
The tool is aimed at the 70% of the global workforce that operates without a desk, and that, according to the company, is routinely the last to know when something goes wrong.
Those working in customer-facing industries like retail, healthcare, logistics, and manufacturing are often the people who define customer experience in the moments that matter most.
And right now, most enterprise communication tools aren’t built to reach them.
When a critical event hits – a system outage, a safety incident, a building evacuation – Resolve sends alerts simultaneously across SMS, voice, WhatsApp, and the 8×8 Work mobile app, with no corporate email address, company device, or app login required.
If a message goes unread, the platform automatically escalates across channels until acknowledgment is confirmed.
“We’ve spent decades over-tooling the C-suite while leaving the frontline to rot in a mess of manual call trees and ignored emails,” said Dave Michels, Principal Analyst and Founder at TalkingPointz.
“In a world of infinite noise, messaging is one of the most effective things that actually moves the needle.”
“By the time an email is read, the crisis has already evolved. 8×8 Resolve stops treating the deskless workforce like an afterthought, using the channels they actually check – SMS and WhatsApp – to turn chaotic disruptions into orchestrated, audited responses.”
The argument here runs deeper than operational efficiency. For any business where frontline workers are the primary point of contact with customers, the ability to reach them quickly during an incident is a customer experience issue.
A retail associate uninformed about a store closure, or a healthcare aide unaware of a system-wide outage, cannot serve customers effectively. In regulated industries, the fallout can stretch well beyond a poor satisfaction score.
From Notification to Audit Trail
Resolve generates a full exportable communication log for every event, capturing who was notified, on which channel, and when they responded.
That audit trail serves incident responders, crisis management teams, HR, BCDR, and compliance stakeholders – and is designed to eliminate the post-incident scramble to reconstruct a timeline that many organizations currently face.
Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, summed up the problem the solution is built to address:
“Too many critical events still end with someone asking who got the message and who didn’t. 8×8 Resolve answers that question before it’s asked.
“It is designed to reach every employee on whatever channel they are reachable on, escalates automatically until acknowledgment is confirmed, and produces a complete record of every step.
“From first alert to confirmed resolution, in one platform. For businesses with distributed or deskless workforces, that’s the difference between managing an incident and being managed by one.”
Beyond outbound notification, Resolve also enables employees to act as incident sensors.
Conversational AI lets workers report incidents directly via SMS or WhatsApp, with structured data captured without requiring a separate app, form, or training.
Workflows trigger automatically via webhook or schedule, and recipient lists stay current through native sync with Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, Okta, and Workday.
The compliance angle adds further urgency for sectors including healthcare, retail, education, utilities, and manufacturing.
A 2025 Gartner report found that 62 percent of heads of enterprise risk management admit their current business continuity plans fail to adequately prepare their organizations for potential disruptions – a figure 8×8 is leaning on to make the case that the problem Resolve addresses is not just common, but widespread and largely unsolved.
8×8 Resolve is available now for select customers. Organizations can reach out to their account manager or visit 8×8.com/products/resolve.
