Samuel Wilson
CEO / 8×8 Inc.
The venture capitalist and former owner of the online clothing company Zappos Tony Hsieh once said: “Putting the customer first means standing in their shoes and anticipating their concerns. Customer service shouldn’t just be a department; it should be the entire company.”
No matter how good your company’s products or services might be, Samuel Wilson will tell you that unless you have customer satisfaction, your sales are never going to grow.
“You can spend years building a product, but without repeat customers, you simply cannot grow your revenues,” said Wilson, who in June of this year was appointed Chief Executive Officer of 8×8 Inc. – one of the country’s leading integrated cloud communications platform providers – after having served as the company’s interim CEO since November 2022 and its Chief Financial Officer before that.
“A few years back, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) published a survey of 15,000 consumers, and the punchline was one in three people will leave a brand they love after just one bad customer support experience, and 80 percent will leave after two bad customer support experiences,” he said.
With that reality in mind, Wilson said that since taking over the helm of 8×8, he and his team have focused heavily on one of the company’s “hidden assets,” its contact center solution.
“I realized that if we brought our contact centers more to the forefront and really incorporated them with our communications solution, there was a tremendous amount of opportunity for us to change the narrative regarding customer service,” he said.
“I believe software companies are first and foremost judged by the quality of their software.”
Wilson said that after years of offshoring customer service to call centers around the globe, U.S. companies have finally begun to wake up to the fact that post-sales customer attention is as important as – or even more important than – selling in the first place.
“There’s this realization by corporate America and the rest of the world that you’re spending all this money to acquire customers, and then, through bad customer support and bad customer experiences, you’re losing them. It’s counterproductive,” he said.
Between 2000 and 2020, Wilson pointed out that corporate spending on contact centers – which are the primary means through which corporations interface with their customers – declined every single year.
“With a solid financial foundation, high customer retention and a value proposition that resonates with mid-size enterprises around the world, I believe we are well positioned as our industry evolves.”
But in the last few years, Wilson said that that trend has reversed, and there has been much more corporate spending on contact centers and other tools aimed at helping to retain customers.
“8×8 is generally known as a UCaaS provider – unified communications as a service, voice, video and chat for employee collaboration. And I think that’s where we were four or five years ago. Today, we’re much more about XCaaS, Experience Communications as a Service,” he said.
And that XCaaS focus at 8×8 has translated into what Wilson called “customer obsession and customer engagement.”
“I believe there’s a large secular shift going on in the marketplace, in the entire software industry, and 8×8 has a chance to ride that wave,” he said.
“I think that is the single largest opportunity out there, to ride a large cyclical change that’s happening in the industry.”
Wilson also said that it is very important to continually invest in research and development, especially in an industry where major technological advances are occurring daily.
“First and foremost, I’m a firm believer in innovation. So under my tenure, both as CFO and CEO, we’ve increased our R&D spending almost four times over the last four years and two times over the last two years,” he said.
“So we’ve gone from a company that was spending 9 or 10 percent of its revenues on R&D to one that earmarks 15 or 16 percent of its revenue on R&D. And because of that, I think we are building great products and services. Software is a service, but it’s fundamentally a product. And we are building great products.”
Wilson’s strategy is clearly working: 8×8’s financial performance for the fourth fiscal quarter of last year, which ended on March 31, proved steady, with total revenue increasing 2 percent year-over-year to $185 million, and service revenue increasing 2 percent year-over-year to $177 million.
And for 2025, 8×8 is expected to top the $800 million mark in revenues.
But in order to ensure that production and sales do not overshadow customer care, Wilson said that 8×8 limits the number of major projects that it undertakes to no more than five at any given time, and it also makes sure that there is an executive sponsor overseeing each of those projects.
“I insist on receiving a readout on those projects every two weeks,” he added.
“We have a set of corporate cultural norms under which the individuals that are working on a project understand that its success is not based on their individual performance or their department’s performance, but on the results of the collaborative team. It’s what the team does that matters.”
Using soccer as a metaphor, Wilson said that at 8×8, business is a team sport.
“You can have great offense and you can have great defense, but if you don’t have some collaboration between the two, you will never have a great soccer team,” he said.
In soccer, the coach or team captain is charged with motivating and directing the players toward a common objective of success, Wilson said.
“We try to build a model that’s very similar to that to create a set of teams and strategic projects to drive operational efficiencies over 12 months so that we have a cross-functional team with clear leadership, clear objectives and clear incentives to make our projects work.”
As for the future, Wilson said that over the next three to five years, 8×8 is looking to accelerate its growth rate. “That is a hard thing for a company our size to do, but we’re in a transition,” he said.
“When it comes to delivering a complete solution to our customers, we have a whole other ecosystem of next-generation startups in which we have integrated our products together. I think this is a very difficult thing to do in technology today, but we’ve done it so that the end customer gets a solution that works.”
“We’ve taken some actions on the less favorable portions of our business, and we’ve doubled- and tripled-down on the more favorable growth aspects of our business.”
Once 8×8 consolidates it growth plan, Wilson said that he wants to divide increased revenues between driving shareholder value and putting more money into R&D.
“We are focused first and foremost on innovation. We’re building a highly innovative product that is going to be the platform that allows next-generation machine learning and artificial intelligence products to ride on top of our software,” he said.
“This is fundamentally different from where the rest of the industry is going. The rest of the industry is heading toward a strategy in which you go to a single vendor and buy everything from them. We are building a platform that allows a multitude of vendors to integrate together. It’s all part of the notion of our customer obsession.”
