Earlier this month, 8x8 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.
8x8 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, 8x8 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 8x8 Analyst Summit.
1. 8x8 Assumes Complexity on Its Customers’ Behalf
During his keynote, Sam Wilson, CEO of 8x8, 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 8x8’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, 8x8 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 8x8 has taken on the burden of packaging the correct products – vendor complexity and customer simplicity.
2. 8x8 Expands Engage
At the event, 8x8 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.