8x8 Express (discontinued) vs. Webex Calling

The 8x8 app is great and very user friendly and straightforward. Team Members can adjust their own setting as needed.

Incentivized

It seems quite able to handle the normal day to day voice call requirements quite well. Our previous Cisco phones had cameras that could do video calls, but if we need that we go to a Zoom session. Conference room use is not terribly convenient, although this might just be a case of us figuring out how to adapt the environment.

Incentivized

• So easy to use!
• Voicemail - can be accessed anywhere, includes transcription of the voicemail and an email message with the recording
• Telephone services without all the fees of a landline service
• Auto attendant, offering recordings of our messages

Incentivized

• Internal calling can be done by searching user in directory or by dialing short code extensions for users. Pretty quick and easy to reach internal people.
• Webex Calling integrated seamlessly with call recording solutions making it very useful for compliance call recording which is needed by customer service centres today.
• Features like call forwarding, call transfer, conference, voice mail, etc are available.
• User authorisation for different types of calls is available.
• It provides basic call centre features as well so that companies requiring basic call centre features can use it within Webex Calling.

Incentivized

• We are just starting to use the platform and using limited features at the moment and 8x8 is doing everything we need it to do.

Incentivized

• I think what it's doing is it is still the leader when it comes to being able to present calling platforms. And I mean I guess it's number one competitor from a software perspective is Microsoft Teams, Cisco is doing everything possible to provide open source to enable Microsoft and Cisco to work together, particularly when it comes to user room experiences so that no one is feeling like they're left alone or compromised or somewhat segregated when they're choosing one technology versus the other, which is a great thing.

Incentivized

The service can be intermittent and the call forwarding feature will not always work perfectly. There will be periods of time where the calling feature will not work at all and people on the other end can hear me but I am unable to hear them. It also requires a fairly strong signal which can be an issue if you work somewhere remote or a building without much service.

Incentivized

It is a very easy product to deploy and configure and to really take advantage of. It does not matter if you are using it in an office or your home, or for a security office or a collaboration meeting room - you have the right endpoint available for each case and the configuration parameters to improve the functionality you need.

I've not actually had it ever be unavailable when I needed to use it. As mentioned before, a network outage would take it down, but we have redundant systems for our network connections with automatic failover.

Incentivized

I don't really see this impacting any other system performance at all. The client is very light use on resources, even on my iPhone. I don't know what else it connects to behind the scenes other then the campus directory, but I haven't seen or heard of any impacts. It seems fairly self contained except for wherever it interfaces with the general telephone system connectivity outside the campus.

Incentivized

If you get less than 4 phones you fall into the online only customer service. There were a couple of times that I could have used more assistance but figuring it out online was a bit of a hassle.

Incentivized

I have been working for a long time with Cisco as a provider and also Cisco TAC and Cisco Support Engineers. The support starts right beforehand in the documentation of the product you are interested in. From the start you have a good, complete, and detailed and easy to read datasheet and there's always someone available to answer any questions.

We did it inhouse for our teams

Incentivized

8x8 has a much lower cost that avaya for the same features. 8x8 is a bit more user friendly than some other larger well established brands. It still uses industry standards in terminology and call flows to for anyone with voip experience its a pain free switch to make over.

Incentivized

The company uses Microsoft Teams. They do use Microsoft Teams right now and for a long time a lot of the different practices have been using on-premise, contact Call Manager and Unified Communications Express. But Cisco WebEx, the cloud-based product is one of the new ones. And some of our other site practices are also using RingCentral. So cloud calling is not new to the company. For those of us who are familiar with Cisco products, the transition to WebEx calling is not as difficult as it might be for some other products. Going from on-prem to RingCentral, there is more of a learning curve with.

Incentivized

So far it has been very reliable, with very little down time that was associated with the product itself. We have had network outages due to external factors such as construction cutting a fiber link, but other than that kind of thing not much for failures.

Incentivized

• Being able to listen to phone calls when there is a discrepancy
• Keeping the honest honest by knowing we can listen to calls
• Easy to communicate internally, been very helpful and time saving

Incentivized

• Webex Calling allowed us to continue working in a remote world
• While workshops are best in person, Webex Calling allowed us to continue offering that critical service and also included break out room functionality for small group activities, when needed.
• The recording feature allows everyone to hyper focus on the discussion - if anything was missed in notes, it was always saved in the recording when we had one. Perfect for interviews and workshops.

Incentivized