8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams App adds SMS, MMS and Fax capabilities to Teams; Provides Teams users with more digital communication channels for employee and customer engagement.
8×8, a leading integrated cloud communications platform, has announced that the new 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams app has added Short Message Service (SMS), Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) and fax capabilities to further extend the Teams experience for users.
8×8’s global direct routing solution now provides enterprise-grade telephony plus digital communication features to enhance employee and customer experience for organizations adopting Teams for collaboration.
“For organizations that use Microsoft Teams, Direct Routing delivers not only voice call cost efficiencies but also a better end-user experience. The benefits are essentially a best-of-breed approach to a holistic unified communications, collaboration and customer engagement solution,” said Denise Lund, Research Director, WW Telecom and Unified Communications at IDC.
“The new 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams app enables a seamless end-user experience when it comes to calling, integrated messaging, like SMS, MMS and Fax, and other converged communication capabilities, which are easily accessible by employees from inside their familiar Teams collaboration solution.”
8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams helps organizations shift to hybrid work by turning Teams into an advanced communications and collaboration hub. The new 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams app, available for download at the Microsoft AppSource, empowers employees to easily use and manage 8×8 features from any Teams endpoint, including:
- Integrated business messaging: With individual business phone and fax numbers, users can conveniently send and receive SMS or MMS messages (US and Canada) or faxes (globally) directly from Teams.
- Individual or group voicemail: Users are able to view and listen to individual or group voicemails at the click of a button.
- Call queue management: Enables users to log in or out of assigned call queues to engage customers as call volumes vary throughout the day.
- Self-service access: Allows users to customize settings, including voicemail recordings and call-forwarding rules.
“As organizations with a distributed workforce rapidly adopt Microsoft Teams for collaboration, enabling employees to use and manage advanced communications and customer engagement features directly from any Teams endpoint is critical,” said Dejan Deklich, Chief Product Officer at 8×8. “With 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams, organizations can free up IT resources to drive their business objectives, while also providing employees the ability to interact with colleagues and customers from anywhere using Teams.”
8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams delivers direct routing capabilities that allow Teams users to make and receive calls on the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) natively from any Teams endpoint. 8×8 Global Reach, which includes regional, Microsoft-certified Session Border Controllers (SBC) across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, enables organizations using Teams for collaboration to access PSTN services and global calling plans in more than 43 countries.
