8x8 Virtual Office

Benefits:

The 8x8 team is the best. Great technology and great customer support!

Drawbacks:

Our office has been with 8x8 from February of 2014 and has had no reason to change to another company.

In sum:

Why do I like this company? Not only do I like this company I have a great relationship with working from my office phones and using this wonderful broadband phone company. Now wait, no landlines in my office. No landlines. I was able to work with this team and duplicate my office phones and place them in my home as well. I do a lot of cloud technology for our Dental office and it is important to have a phone system that can pull the load. I love the fact that I have an automated attendant that can play any message I record on it. I can custom fit it to our office and place any message I want our patients to hear. Now lets get down to the flexibility of this phone system. Ready? I can answer calls from a phone, on the computer, on an app on my cell phone anywhere. This company has the ability to track any call that comes in. If a patient does not leave a message I can still get in touch with them to help them out. New people calling in also can get a call back even if they do not leave a message. Now you say if you had a big staff you would not need to have to call them back you would answer the phone. True, but I save on staff salary, and possible lack of staff motivation this way. I roll the money back into the practice. If I am doing office work in another location and it is after hours I am still able to monitor the calls and call them right back. If it is an emergency they can get scheduled very quickly. The team at 8x8.com can customize your phone needs for any size office. They were able to help me out when I needed a fax machine very quickly lets, say in the next two hours. I still remember that day that I called my sales rep out in the West Coast about 6:30 am and he went far and beyond to help our company set up a broadband fax machine. He grabbed his coffee and within 2 hours my fax machine was up and running. This helped our patient with keeping an appointment that they need to go to and not have to reschedule. The office that sprang the surprise on us was quick to note how fast our team came threw. 8X8.com is part of our team because I feel that we are on the same team. You will not get a better team working for you when it comes to your phone needs. This team is BAA compliant for medical and dental offices. Also not just medical and dental but for insurance companies, accountants and many other offices that fit into HIPPA compliance. Love working with their technology team when I need to change anything on my phone system. These guys are great to work with and I guess that is why we have been going strong with them now since 2014.

Benefits:

This software is very easy to use on my laptop of mobile phone. We collaborate a lot with international offices and 8x8 makes it really easy to call internationally from my phone or laptop. They also send voicemails directly to your email, which is a nice feature for people who work remotely.

Drawbacks:

Every once in a while it crashes and I have to restart the app. Also, sometimes it hangs when I try to shutdown my Mac so I have to force-quit to turn my laptop off.

Benefits:

I am a small business owner. I did extensive research into VoIP providers before selecting 8x8 for my business over three years ago. They had reasonable pricing at the time and offered a discount when I joined if I agreed to sign up for a 12-month term.

Drawbacks:

Their platform was not intuitive so the setup was painful. Eventually I was able to get the service up and running for my company. Immediately we noticed that the call quality was poor and unreliable. I had signed up to a 12-month term so we tried to make the most of it. As a new small business we were so busy trying to satisfy our customers that we didn't have time to search for a new VoIP provider anyway. We suffered through 8x8 for 3+ years. Over time my team started taking calls on their personal cell phone's instead of through the 8x8 computer / mobile app because 8x8's call quality was so unreliable. I did research and found a much more cost effective solution, which after testing also had better call quality and a more intuitive interface. When I tried to cancel my 8x8 services I was informed that because I had initially signed up for a 12 month term that I would be required to pay for over 6 months of remaining service even if I canceled and transfered the numbers. The services is so horrible that it was worth the ransom to leave 8x8. If you are a small business owner stay away!

Benefits:

8x8 virtual office is awesome! There are so many cool features to this software. We have used 8x8 for over 5 years now, customer service has always been super helpful if we ever had any issues or questions. Purchasing new phones for new employees is a breeze, and setting everything up is always straight forward! What more can you ask for? We also love that virtual office has the chat feature, we utilize this daily to chat with all of the employees. We also love that there is a app, all of the employees have this app on their phone and have been using it like their desk phone during this COVID work from home time.

Drawbacks:

there are sometimes some delays, but very rarely is there any issues!

In sum:

We absolutely love 8x8 virtual office, we do not see a world where we would switch to a different phone software. If you are looking for a seamless phone software look no further!

Benefits:

Virtual office provides so much value for my company. At first, I thought it may be out of my price range but once I started it up and tried it out, I realized it's a steal for everything they offer. Not only does the Virtual Contact Center work as a medium between the customer and whoever can get to the phones at that time, it frees up so much of the middle-man work and the cost I would be spending on someone to be a greeter can go to more lucrative programs. The Contact Center sure is valuable, but the real value comes from the Virtual meetings office software. I say this because my team does a lot of off-site work as well as hiring freelancers for shorter jobs. Being able to meet with a whole room of people in any country and time-zone is so valuable for my business!

Drawbacks:

Like I described in the top paragraph, I initially had doubts about the cost. These doubts were crushed when I saw all of the value that this product adds, however it could always be cheaper. The only other qualm I have is that it definitely seems to be more positioned to larger companies. I have a smaller business with fluctuating team sizes so Virtual Office isn't quite as agile as my team.

Benefits:

What I like most about this software is that it has a mobile application and I am able to take the calls practically anywhere I am, even when I am away from the computer. I am then able to connect back to the computer with a press of a button.

Drawbacks:

What I liked least about the software was whenever there is some sort of bug or issue, it is difficult to get support to fix the issue quickly. Especially lately it seems that there have been more and more bugs in the desktop app. Notifications haven't been showing up for call queues on time causing us to miss calls. Customers get a voicemail box is full even though there is no notice of it being full.

In sum:

Overall it is an ok voip system, however recently there have been more issues with the desktop app.

Benefits:

Ease of mobility so I can take calls from ANYWHERE! Love that I can take call from desk phone, app on my mobile or thru app on computer- whichever is most convenient at the time.

Drawbacks:

Although, I do like the video conference feature sometimes it does glitch. Also, if app on computer desktop is not open then you don't get chat messages or in coming calls. I have it to automatically open when I start computer but sometimes accidentally close it.

In sum:

Great tool to have - especially if you work remotely a lot. But, it's also handy to have if you move around in office and not always at desk phone.

Benefits:

We use desktop VOIP phones, the mobile app, and the desktop app. They offer a "call park" feature that other system don't, allowing a parked call to be picked up from any other phone in the office, as opposed to other systems where you only put a call on hold and can then only pick up from the same line. The call quality is good, regardless of which access method used.

Drawbacks:

TERRIBLE support. Years ago, support was US-based, fast answer, easy to understand (native English), and always had the right answer. Reps used and knew the system. In the past years it has all shifted to Singapore where they are hard to understand, hardly understand your question, and don't seem to know the answer to anything without putting you on hold and going somewhere to look it up. Obviously a cheap off-shore call center. I tried their support chat last time and it was worse - on hold forever and huge delay between replies while they obviously worked other chats. The desktop app is pretty poor. They gave it a facelift, but its super slow to open and use - not sure what language they wrote it in. Half the time I use it to try to play back a voicemail, I have to hit the play button multiple times as it's unresponsive. The "new message" indicator never seems to clear. I use their web interface to play back call recordings for training. Most of the time they won't play through their antiquated web interface, giving only a spinning "wait" cursor. Instead, I have to select a batch to download as a ZIP file and play them locally. Even when the web interface does work, there's no area for taking notes or anything to attach to the recording for future reference. A colleague with a Mac can't even use the client anymore because it won't work on newer versions of macOS. Their support was unable to solve. He gave up. I can no longer recommend 8x8.

In sum:

Sadly, after many years of use, I can't recommend it anymore due to the problems described above with support and their poorly-written apps. Their core technology is good though and it would be possible to return to good service and bring in some good talent to fix these issues, but who knows if that will happen. Why don't companies learn how much customers HATE the terrible off-shore support experiences that they have to deal with in so many industries these days?

Benefits:

Decent service for internet calling. Web application is fairly easy to navigate unless you're looking for customer service or tech support.

Drawbacks:

Customer service/tech support department don't communicate with each other and so one doesn't know what the other is doing or has done. Sales Rep/Account Manager is very, very hard to get in touch with but that is who I am always directed to call...

In sum:

It's pretty sad when the call center you contact for service can't get in touch with your account rep or his supervisor for over a week.

Benefits:

User interface is fairly intuitive. It's really easy to use instant messaging, access voicemail, and find contacts. The instant messaging feature is probably the best tool 8x8 Virtual Office has to offer.

Drawbacks:

It's very buggy. There will be times where it says I have unread messages when my mailbox is clear. It also crashes on me a lot. These are annoying issues, but they could also be much worse.

In sum:

It's been ok. Gets the job done. Has its issues, but not a bad platform overall.