CLOUD-BASED SYSTEMS

Choosing a national vendor for a cloud-based phone system means having global reach, financial strength, streamlined customer experience, advanced technology, and application integrations. However, local relationships and support may not be as emphasized.

3rd party handset manufacturers have streamlined the customer experience (onboarding, training, moves/adds/changes etc), and have the most sophisticated technology and application integrations.

UPGRADE YOUR PHONE SYSTEM

CLOUD-BASED PHONE SYSTEMS

FEATURES & FUNCTIONS

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Moves/Adds/Changes

The best cloud phone system vendors make this very easy for the customer. They allow customers to add/takeaway users via a portal or through a very friendly set of people on their help desk. Cloud vendors like 8×8 know they need to make it easy for you and if they do they will keep you as a customer for a long time.

Most cloud phone systems have a lot of options because they want to serve the customer in the most flexible way possible. Example: a manufacturing company might have very simple needs on the manufacturing floor, more traditional needs in the office and then complex needs in their customer service department and field sales. The cloud phone system provider will have various licensing subscriptions to get the right set of tools to the right user at the right price for the company.

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Call Quality

Cloud-based call quality with major carriers like 8×8 is extremely good. They have invested millions and millions into their backbone, technology, and networks. They also have sophisticated software (usually through a browser or smartphone app) that helps manage the call quality at the device level. Just like the other solutions the quality of the local network and local internet connection the user has will impact call quality but these solutions are getting more and more capable at handling even poor internet with their compression technologies.

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Maintenance

One of the huge benefits of a cloud-based system is there is no maintenance that the customer has to perform on the software or services. All of the system updates, security patches, etc are done in the cloud or through the cloud to keep your subscription and services up to date.

High reliability & Business Continuity

Safe & Secure Communications

8×8 ensures high reliability and business continuity by delivering its cloud-based communications using secure, fully redundant data centers.

Security and privacy begin with the way data is handled, stored and protected. The 8×8 platform conforms to stringent specifications for securing financial information, customer privacy and computer networks:
• Consumer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI)
• Secure Coding practices including the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) and Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE) List
• Fraud Detection
• Secure Endpoint Provisioning

How is your current communications provider handling your data? Here are eight questions to ask.

Business Cloud Phones

Give your employees the right tools to Communicate

Employees and customers increasingly communicate across boundaries of geography, device, time, and channel. Hybrid work is only formalizing a trend already well underway. Challenges arise. As companies search for communications technology that bridges the employee and customer experience gaps, they find that an integrated platform provides the highest level of reliability and security, as well as the best overall value.

Business Cloud Phones

why do we recommend 8×8?

Streamlined efforts—a single deployment of 8×8’s integrated cloud platform for voice, chat, and meetings
Risk-free, custom approach—the 8×8 team will be with you every step of the way as you deploy at your own pace
Savings—reduce up to 50% in communications spend by consolidating various vendors into one easy-to-manage platform
Reliability—8×8 is the only vendor with platform wide 99.99999% uptime SLA
Global availability—8×8 offers full PSTN replacement across 40+ countries

CLOUD PHONE SYSTEM

COST OF OWNERSHIP

There are two main things to understand when considering a Cloud Phone System investment:

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Subscription Cost

The first is that it’s a subscription cost that doesn’t go away as long as you have users on the system.

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Start-up Costs

The second is there are start-up costs. Handsets (usually optional), implementation services, and training services

We strongly recommend that organizations not fall for the free setup. It sounds good but ultimately it will place more work and more stress on your people than the vendor – the result and experience will be less than optimal.

Subscriptions for the service and the carrier fees can be as low as $12/mo per user. The average cost is $20/mo per user but advanced features like Call Center, Contact Center, and/or Analytics can run upwards of $60/mo per user.

Business Cloud Phones

Cloud Phone System Delivery Method

Good vendors have a very well-defined onboarding process that includes pre-programming, shipping and go-live processes. All of this work is done remotely and unless there is a local partner anything locally will need to be self-performed by the customer. This can be acceptable in straightforward, small implementations but its not recommended for anything beyond that.