8×8 announced the Kansas City Royals Major League Baseball (MLB) team deployed the 8×8 Open Communications Platform™ to allow employees and contact centre agents to operate from anywhere and continue working productively even as the start of the season was delayed almost four months.
As part of its digital transformation initiative, the Kansas City Royals replaced legacy, on-premises communications and contact centre systems with 8×8’s cloud enterprise communications platform in order to improve employee, partner, and customer experience. Working closely with technology partner System Target and 8×8, the Royals originally scheduled to go live on 8×8 X Series, an integrated cloud voice, team chat, video meetings and contact centre solution, in March before the official start of the MLB season.
“Whenever we start thinking about transformation, it’s about doing it seamlessly and without disruption. Due to the global crisis and shelter-in-place directives, we accelerated the 8×8 deployment by a week, and not only was it seamless, it was invaluable in helping us avoid major disruption,” said Brian Himstedt, Senior Director of Technology at the Kansas City Royals. “The forced move to remote work accelerated the pace of change of employee behavior and speed of adoption of new technology used to work effectively. As a result we have realised benefits more quickly than planned as usage of 8×8’s single integrated desktop and mobile apps for communication and collaboration are now firmly entrenched with our employees.”
The Royals deployed more than 500 points of communications across the organisation providing the location-independent workforce with a single phone number and team chat and video conferencing capabilities that are accessible anywhere on any device. In addition, the organisation implemented a complete 8×8 Contact Center solution to provide a solid foundation that could be extended over time to deliver an exceptional, multichannel fan experience.
The sales and customer service teams quickly embraced 8×8’s collaborative contact centre capabilities while working remotely, using daily standup video meetings and lively group chat rooms to boost morale and continue to develop a motivated work culture in inventive ways extending far beyond normal on-site activities.
“8×8 Quality Management allows us to build upon this strong work environment by providing the customer service and sales managers with the ability to better monitor, guide, coach, and share successes to enhance agent efficiency,” added Himstedt. “In addition, 8×8 Speech Analytics enables us to pull out valuable insights from customer engagements so we can continue to better understand our fans and the value delivered in our interactions with them.”
“During this critical time, Major League Baseball teams, like organisations of every size across every industry, have quickly realised the importance of adopting an operate-from-anywhere mindset to ensure business resilience,” said Vik Verma, Chief Executive Officer at 8×8, Inc. “By deploying the 8×8 Open Communications Platform and driving employee adoption during the current crisis, the Kansas City Royals were able to never stop working. We’re proud we were able to help them start off the season ready to play great ball.”
The 8×8 Open Communications Platform is the industry’s most complete portfolio of operate-from-anywhere enterprise communications. It uniquely brings together the essential digital workplace elements required, combining voice, team chat, meetings, and contact centre solutions fuelled by shared intelligent communications services like AI-driven expert routing and predictive analytics. The 8×8 Open Communications Platform accelerates digital transformation initiatives and strengthens business responsiveness and resilience by providing secure, scalable, and extensible capabilities that are required for organisations to create unique employee and customer experiences at scale. For more information, visit the 8×8 Open Communications Platform.
About 8×8, Inc.
8×8, Inc. (NYSE: EGHT) is transforming the future of business communications as a leading Software-as-a-Service provider of voice, video, chat, contact centre, and enterprise-class API solutions powered by one global cloud communications platform. 8×8 empowers workforces worldwide to connect individuals and teams so they can collaborate faster and work smarter. Real-time business analytics and intelligence provide businesses unique insights across all interactions and channels so they can delight end-customers and accelerate their business.
For additional information, visit www.8×8.com