What's Up with Tech?
Tech Transformation with Evan Kirstel: A podcast exploring the latest trends and innovations in the tech industry, and how businesses can leverage them for growth, diving into the world of B2B, discussing strategies, trends, and sharing insights from industry leaders!
With over three decades in telecom and IT, I've mastered the art of transforming social media into a dynamic platform for audience engagement, community building, and establishing thought leadership. My approach isn't about personal brand promotion but about delivering educational and informative content to cultivate a sustainable, long-term business presence. I am the leading content creator in areas like Enterprise AI, UCaaS, CPaaS, CCaaS, Cloud, Telecom, 5G and more!
What's Up with Tech?
From Telecom to AI: How 8x8 Simplifies Employee and Customer Conversations
Interested in being a guest? Email us at admin@evankirstel.com
Cloud communications has evolved far beyond buzzwords and technical features—today it's about delivering real business outcomes. In this engaging conversation with Bruno, CMO of 8x8, we explore how one of the original players in the communications technology space continues to adapt and innovate in a highly competitive market.
Bruno shares a refreshingly straightforward approach to making complex technology accessible: focus on the business benefits rather than technical specifications. As he puts it, "There's so much fatigue in the industry on the features, the bytes, and everything that we're pushing." Instead, 8x8 emphasizes how their unified communications, contact center, and API solutions work together to improve customer experiences and drive growth.
The discussion takes us through the evolution of workplace communications in the post-pandemic era. While 8x8 embraces hybrid work, Bruno offers thoughtful perspectives on when face-to-face interaction adds unique value: "When you run creative sessions, or deep data sessions, or when you're in a C-level strategy meeting... the energy in the room is really important." This nuanced view reflects 8x8's understanding that technology should enable flexibility rather than dictate a single approach.
We also dive into 8x8's practical approach to AI implementation. Rather than chasing trendy applications, they focus on using AI to analyze communication patterns across channels, identify operational bottlenecks, and deliver actionable business intelligence. Bruno emphasizes the importance of building trust through simplicity and accountability, noting that in an industry where technology decisions have long-term implications, customers need partners they can trust for the long haul.
Want to connect with 8x8 and learn more about their approach to business communications? Visit 8x8.com and check their events tab for upcoming opportunities to engage with their team across the US, UK, Europe, and Asia.
More at https://linktr.ee/EvanKirstel
Hey everybody, really excited for this chat today with one of the OGs in the cloud communication space, 8x8, and the CMO at 8x8. Bruno, how are you Pretty good, thanks for having us. Well, thanks for being here. Really excited to catch up because I've known 8x8, gosh since the early 90s late 80s. Maybe You've been through so much in this industry over the decades and yet continuing to innovate and push forward. For listeners who may not be familiar with 8x8, how would you describe you and some of the key problems that you solve for customers? These days.
Speaker 2:It's a good question. Elevator pitch, here we go. So 8x8 is a business communications company that helps put together employee and customer conversations together in a simple way. All of that infrastructure that helps your company grow faster and your companies like you more.
Speaker 1:Well, that's a simple elevator pitch, but I'll take it Sounds good, you got to start high level.
Speaker 2:I'm happy to kind of go as deep as you want. I think you know I've been in this space a long time and I put a lot of effort in not jumping to the CCAS, ucas, cpas. So I'm taking a step back and saying you know, if I was not really aware of 8x8, where do we start that conversation Like, ah, okay, that's interesting, I'd like to know more. And then we go into the 2000 acronyms that our industry has.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll avoid the four-letter acronyms today, but you know, in terms of CMO, for over a year, I mean, what's been the biggest challenge in making cloud communications understandable and appealing to your customers these days customers these days?
Speaker 2:It's a good question.
Speaker 2:I think the biggest and most important change in our space is how can we make what we do, which is business communications, something that actually translates into business benefits, right, we can talk a lot about the features and all of the specifics, from the telecom all the way to the AI, down to the CCaaS, transcription, summarization, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2:I think there's so much fatigue in the industry on, you know, the features, the bytes and everything that we're pushing. I think they are really important but, at the end of the day, how you put them together, how you leverage them in the right way to make you and your business successful, is what really matters to me and, honestly, since I've been here, it's one of the biggest changes we've been trying to drive. Again, I love our products, we have amazing technology, but people buy technology for a reason, right, I know that's very cliche coming in and saying that here, but in our space, I think there's there's a lot, of a lot of fatigue out there and there's a lot of players that are still pushing just the same old, same old.
Speaker 1:And yet the drive to improve customer experience continues and you're really focused on that area. How do you see that happening through 8x8 technology?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we've been. If you go back in time, we've been one of the first players to introduce the single platform for communications and then layering that into contact center. So we've been doing that for a long time. We then added in communication APIs, and every time I say an acronym I should give you a dollar. So we'll see at the end of the podcast how many dollars I've given you. But so if you put together unified communications or business communications and then you add contact center and then you add the APIs, those are the three categories that we play in and we've been doing that for a long time.
Speaker 2:I think the difference there is because we've been in it for a long time the ability to translate that back to an experience, to a company. How you do that, the services, the experience is kind of our latest way of seeing the world. There, where we've been evolving to and I do think, if you go back to business, acquisition costs has been at all time highs. We're all tired of having bad experiences, so it's never been more important to companies to find a way to do that. Now is it easy? There's so many ways and so many things you can do. That's what we're trying to simplify.
Speaker 1:Fantastic and you're in an environment where there's so many competitors in UC and contact center and you've been around for many years so you appreciate that. But how do you set apart your technology and messaging?
Speaker 2:in the market these days. So if you think about simplification, a lot of our buyers and a lot of the people out there that are buying this technology or that are starting to realize that they have to evolve their technologies. It's a very complicated business. So to put together and stitch together all of these different things is not an easy task for any IT and line of business CX department. So the way we differentiate is we've been doing this for a long time on putting the platform together, and we're also got much better understanding what are the things that you need, when do you need and what are the main pieces that you put together. So it's all about the right technology that you need across your business, right? So how can you get business communications to serve your customer experience direction? That's really the question we're trying to answer and I think it's becoming one of our biggest differentiators.
Speaker 2:If you look back and see the amount of customers that are successful using our software what I'm saying is that are successful in their businesses using our software versus other vendors you're going to see that we're putting a lot of effort there and that drives a lot of our internal transformation, a lot of how we see our customer. How do we become more customer centric and all of those things? So I think it's a little bit of like you've got to have badass tech but you've got to have that tech in service of your customers, in service of your business, of their businesses. A lot of people say that how do they back that up internally? How do they see the customer internally? All of those things add up. We put a lot of pride in that and that's one of our biggest differentiators Fantastic.
Speaker 1:And that's one of our biggest differentiators Fantastic. So we've seen the market shift from COVID and fully remote to hybrid to, in some cases, back to the office at scale and everything in between. How has that evolved? Your positioning and marketing and selling and delivery as well?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think if you go back, my white beard is going to dictate and share my age. But I think a lot of us had the privilege of building our careers early on by being in office, being in customer meetings face to face, getting their conversations face to face, face-to-face. I think when we went fully remote we lost a little bit about that ability, I should say to learn from on-the-job experience. Right, not eight by eight, but all of us as humans going remote. I think the remote capabilities are awesome, but I think after that, the world changing how you buy, how you sell, how do you work we're both here. Remote, it's awesome, but I think if we were in the same room having a shared glass of coffee, the energy would probably be different. So I think for us we're a hybrid company. We're not forcing anyone into the office. We do sell technologies that enable that. We use that.
Speaker 2:I work in Florida, headquarters is in Campo. I'm also on American Airlines. For me, a little bit of both. But also I think that companies are starting to find a way of the best of both worlds right, and that's where technology comes in. It's not dictating one or the other, it's building around your business and whatever you know empowers your business model and your operating framework. I think there are some things that, in my experience, when you run creative sessions, or when you run deep data sessions, or when you're in a C-level strategy meeting, or if you're putting people on a sales kickoff, the energy in the room is really important. You're sitting down with a customer showing them a demo. Those things, I do think there's a benefit of doing them in person, but I think it depends how do you see it? Like what about? What are your thoughts on that? I'd love to throw that back at you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, there's almost no cookie cutter. Every company I talk to is in a completely different boat and has a different working style, and some are completely happy with remote work, thrive on it, others are completely back in the office and demand their employees. It's almost like it's a complete spectrum. I think that the flexibility of the tech and security and other issues seem to come to the fore now, so it's really interesting to see how the market has just diverged across so many different use cases. I think what's also changing, of course, is AI, and nowhere more exciting than in CX and employee experience and other areas. Do you have any?
Speaker 1:anecdotes or stories around how you're using AI at 8x8 to understand your customers. Maybe market better differently that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:It's a good question and I think as a CMO, I will also try to avoid all the buzz around AI, so we can be very specific. I think, there's two very interesting use cases there when you think about 8Bite internally. Since we rebranded last year, we've been spending a lot of time using AI for two main things. One is how can we be more customer-centric about understanding the data?
Speaker 1:When I say the data.
Speaker 2:It's not just communications data.
Speaker 2:We use our own software so we monitor all of our communications channels from a chat or a meeting between employees, all the way down to the contact center chat bot, email, audio conversation and then we're using all of that to learn what are the main patterns that are having there, what are the main issues that we're seeing? That's number one, but also how can we become more efficient, what are our own bottlenecks, that we're seeing our own operations, what's the sentiment around them, and things like that. So, starting to sew a thread together that gives us an ability to learn from our business instead of reacting to the external channels from our business. I think that's been really fascinating, and it goes from delivering specific agents or agentic implementations that allow us to consume that data but, more important than that, spending a lot of time in architecting what are the right sources of data, what are the right systems that need to be interconnected. For example, I've been feeding a a lot of our creative process all along the rebranding to um, kind of a CMO agent. That became a little bit as an expert of what we do in our brand and we use internally. When we're going to write something, we use that. It gives us not only feedback but it makes sure that we're very aligned to our message. We use that for a lot of data processing around our customers.
Speaker 2:We're also trying when you think about marketing, our job is to really kind of communicate better and grow the company. Targeting customers is very hard, especially at scale. Ai now allows you to have specific, customized message with a switch, so we're trying a lot of those things. When we run our ABM programs, like at a smaller kind of targeting level, we can have very customized message. So there's a lot of things coming up as we change inside marketing, but also as 8x8 change internally to move faster and serve our customers better. Now on point number two all of that, all of those things add up as lessons for us to then evolve our product.
Speaker 2:If you look at every company in our space right now, they're focused in oh, I have this better outer realm use case or this chatbot that gives you this, or this insights report that gives you that. So, if you're talking about your business, are those things that can help you? Yes, they can, but they're all really outer realm use cases. I think for us, we're trying to take those things in a different direction, more aligned to what we're doing internally, which is because we have all of that data together, because we have a single platform that spans across an organization. How can that help us with AI to analyze and to get insights from it, instead of just giving you a better revised chatbot which we do have and I love it, but going much beyond it?
Speaker 1:That's great to hear and speaking of that, I mean how do you build trust and credibility with new customers for 8x8 given all the fake news and lack of trust lack of trust in anything or belief in anything anyone says these days in marketing? It's kind of hard to be a marketing person these days. That must be one of your challenges or key jobs is to have that credibility, and maybe it helps that you go back some. You know 35 years plus in the industry, but what are your thoughts there?
Speaker 2:yeah, um. So I see the world in a very simple way there, and I know I'm in marketing, but I I'm a hardcore kind of we. We lead with the specific and honest examples and we lead like you can be creative and you can do bad as advertisement, and but it has to be solidified or glued to a foundation of things that we can deliver and things that make sense to our customers, right? So I think for us especially and that's a little bit about me, that's what I believe, that's what, like, that's one of the things that when I wake up and when I go to bed, I'm like, okay, we, we're kind of doing the right thing, a hundred percent on asteroids and we can do good marketing. But if people subscribe to this, it is what it is, this is it. There's no, uh, and I know it doesn't happen everywhere, but I think at eight by eight, we really stick to our word. I should say when we have a problem, we send customers a check. When we sell things that don't work, we fix them.
Speaker 2:I think it's about the reputation that you build over time. You can call that a brand, you can call that the respect and the way a company operates, way a company operate. I think those things add up not only from the way we showcase externally but the experience you have with us on delivery, on pre-sale, on sale and then as a customer right. I think most companies are trying to find a partner that they can trust and a platform that's going to be a long-term five to seven year, 10 year decision. So they want to stick to someone that's going to help them and it's going to be with them. I think sometimes when companies are growing in tech out there, they kind of lose touch of that ultimate truth and that's why, over time, a lot of them kind of lose their mojo. I think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think a great example of case in point is Apple, which has tremendous trust and credibility with their customers a big Apple fanboy but they had to admit they're not going to deliver their AI-based Siri this year, as promised. They don't know when they can deliver it and I think it's a big hit to their credibility. They had to pull advertising campaigns and ads and all kinds of things, so even big companies can fail things.
Speaker 2:So even big companies can fail. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I also think the most important thing, especially with AI, you got to land it into a practical use case that has a very specific ROI, because I think the way you cut through the noise is by simplifying it and say, okay, we're going to do this, this is going to be an agent that's going to do X, y, z, and by doing that it will help your business get to Y. I think if we do that and we go back to the companies and say this is how it starts, this is step one. You can go to step 137, but this is step one. I think if we do that and if all companies do that, we kind of demystify it a little bit and we make something concrete that people can trust, that people can buy and consume in a kind of a step-by-step way but, more important than that, something that will drive ROI, which pushes all of us up.
Speaker 1:Oh, great, great example of best practices there. So, looking a little further out, you know, medium, long term, what are some of the trends you're tracking or following around customer engagement or CX that you think will have the biggest impact over this?
Speaker 2:year and next. The world is changing dramatically with the acceleration of AI right. So I think we all of our roadmaps and every roadmap out there is being accelerated either on making sure that we're developing out around use cases that do better agents and things that have better retention or better service. But I think the ultimate question for me that will shape this space is I think we're getting to a time where not only the computational power is rich enough, but also the cost of that computational power is dramatically going down, so that will give companies the ability to start putting together this data in a much more special way, a way that I think I haven't seen or that we haven't seen in this industry. I'm truly excited about that. We've been testing internally, like I told, and it's fascinating what you can learn from your business when you do that. It's just mind-blowing.
Speaker 1:And it's fantastic. So you have a bright future ahead of you. Any lessons learned you'd like to share in your first year, plus Lessons learned you'd like to share.
Speaker 2:In your first year plus, I think there's a lot of lessons and I think what I love about being a CMO is that every day is different when you're changing and charging ahead fast Sometimes an external, sometimes it's internal. I think one of my biggest lessons I think was don't underestimate the power of simplicity and I think in our space, giving that crisp message in a very simple way, cutting through the noise, I think is the most important one. I was always a business outcome type of guy coming in, guy coming in, but I think going very crazy on that message aligned to your business, to the CX. I think it's been a big lesson in terms of how do we get better and iterate over time. I'm very happy where we're at, but I have big expectations so I think we can run faster there.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. So this year we've had a lot of trade shows and events and meetups. Hopefully it'll slow down a little bit, but what are you looking forward to of the next weeks, months, any travel events or otherwise?
Speaker 2:Yeah, we're doing a big. So we're doing this week a big trade show in Vegas called Channel Partners. We've done Enterprise Connect last week. Just coming up out of it, we're going to do a big analyst event in the UK for our industry analysts next week, doing a lot of customer events to kind of get closer to our customers, into what they're doing, where they're going, putting them together to share insights on how they're using AI, how they're seeing CX going in different directions. So I think there's a lot of activity internally with our customers, but also externally with industry events, product launches and exciting things ahead. There are so many events coming up that if you want to take a look, go to 8by8.com, click on our events tab. There's a lot of like we'll be all over the country, all over the UK and Europe, all over Asia. Anyways, there's a lot of good stuff coming.
Speaker 1:That's good to hear. Well, hopefully we can meet at one of those many events. And thanks for joining and sharing peek into the vision and mission.
Speaker 2:Thank you, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:And thanks everyone for listening and watching and sharing. Take care.