Open Forum

Has anyone else experienced an increase in issues related to the work desktop app?
We work out of the new VCC and use the work desktop app for the calls.

We have had dozens of issues the last month and a half that we are switching back to hard phones after working on the 8x8 work app for almost 2 years.

Issues like:

 - Audio / cannot hear
 - No pop-up for answering calls
 - Static on calls

We are missing calls left and right, customers are dropping off the calls.  Every time we go for support they ask for the call examples and then tell us to uninstall/reinstall. 
At this point we cannot continue and are moving employees with major issues to desk phones.

We are all working remote and our policy has everyone to have internet speeds faster than 100 Mbps up/down
Most on laptops

These issues could be wifi related but we haven't had issues for the last 2 years up until about 2 months ago things started getting really bad.

Has anyone else experienced these issues?  We would like to try the 8x8 / teams integration to eliminate the work desktop app.  For now we are moving folks to hard phones as an emergency precaution.

Interesting.  We too have experienced similar issues, but attributed it to our integration with MS Teams. When we pulled an account out of our Teams integration and moved them to the 8x8 desktop app, things improved significantly.  So much so, we are going to move everyone way from the Teams integration by June 2023.  We will see if it remains in an improved state and hopefully we won't begin experiencing what you are describing.  There are other areas of the Teams integration that we did not like, surrounding voicemail and internal versus external calls, so we were moving away anyway.  

Well that is a shame because we thought the Teams integration sounded great on paper!  I'm sorry to hear you all experienced that.

We were unable to take calls yesterday for a full hour because the Work Desktop outage.  That brings us to almost 6 hours of downtime in the last month and a half.  Hopefully you all did not have to deal with that.

Have you see the "alternative" 8x8 Phone App for Teams integration?
8x8 Phone App for Microsoft Teams-About the 8x8 Phone App

Were voicemail, internal/external your only pain points for the standard teams integration?
Had you been using the 8x8 Voice for Teams Companion App?
What issues did you find with internal/external calls?

How did you overcome to lack of self-updating built in company directory like 8x8 Work has already?

Yes, we were using the 8x8 phone App for Teams. It is how we originally deployed 8x8, so we have been using it for two years before coming to this decision. We have spent many hours troubleshooting with 8x8 support and run the utilities, double-checked Firewall settings etc.  Often we would get caught in the middle with, oh, that is a Microsoft issue, with Microsoft counter stating it was an 8x8 issue. 
In the long run it will also save us money since we won't have to purchase/consume the Teams Phone license in addition to the 8x8 license we are already paying.  The issue with internal calls is that we thought you could type in a name from our Teams directory and call, which you can, but it will never transfer to 8x8 voicemail.  It will just ring and ring and then hang up.  No way to leave a voicemail.  A use would have to type in the full DID phone number into the dial-pad, then the call would go through 8x8 and only then you could leave a voicemail.   In other words, 8x8 doesn't use our Microsoft Teams Directory because 8x8 has it's own directory.  When connectivity issues began to increase over the past few months, along with microsoft teams approved headsets not fully functioning, as a test, we moved users over to 8x8 desktop and completely removed their TEAMS licensing integration.  Things cleared up and we never moved the users back.  Now users can call internally using Teams directory, via Teams and leave voicemail  AND, they can use the 8x8 desktop app for all other calls.

Are your users also VCC Agents or only 8x8 Work users?
Have you tried running the 8x8 Network Utility Tool to check for network related issues?
Network Utility Download - 8x8 Support

Did you give examples to support?
The requirement for examples are extremely common across all SIP/VOIP vendors, so much so, some vendor's support teams refuse to accept certain types of cases without examples.

Vcc agents.  We have provided many examples to our vendor.  The Hard Phones have resolved most issues since implementing them to about 25% of our agent force.  Most common issue was the "Could not initialize audio" issue and the 2nd most common issue was a phone call offered in the VCC but never popping up in the 8x8 Work App to answer the call.  Our vendors have had us run network utility on 1 end user which did show some network latency.