The 2025 London Design Awards just handed 8×8 a Gold win for 8×8 Engage, the company’s mobile-first, AI-powered workspace for customer-facing teams. For a competition that prizes clean, intuitive, and user-first digital product design, Engage’s victory is a signal that CX software is finally catching up to how modern teams actually operate—fast, cross-functional, and anywhere but chained to a desk.
The UX Design Awards span everything from healthcare platforms and mobility apps to wearables and smart home interfaces. This year’s Business category favored tools that not only look good but reduce friction, enhance accessibility, and give users back precious time. Engage checked those boxes with surprising elegance for a product category often crowded with cluttered dashboards and disjointed workflows.
The Problem: Customer Teams That Move Fast—Using Tools That Don’t
Most frontline and expert teams juggle more apps in a day than many consumers use in a week. Calls, SMS, WhatsApp threads, email escalations, internal pings—it’s all context that should be unified but rarely is.
The result? Slower responses, lost handoffs, and time wasted hunting for information instead of actually helping customers.
8×8 designed Engage as a corrective to that chaos.
Enter 8×8 Engage: A Unified, Mobile-First Workspace for the Real World
Rather than force teams to adapt to a fixed desktop product, 8×8 built Engage around how people actually work—on the move, switching channels, and collaborating across functions.
At the core is a single intelligent workflow that merges every customer interaction across:
- Voice
- Video
- SMS
- RCS
- Messenger
- Viber
All funneled into one contextual thread powered by AI. No more siloed apps; no more app-hopping to piece together what a customer asked yesterday versus this morning.
The London Design Awards panel highlighted Engage’s balanced mix of mobility, clarity, and real-time intelligence—traits that transform UX from “nice” to “mission-critical.”
Why This Matters: UX Isn’t Cosmetic—It’s Operational
In enterprise software, UX is often treated as a finishing touch, not a design philosophy. But 8×8’s Dhwani Soni, Global VP of Product Design and User Experience, argues the opposite.
“User experience is a business differentiator,” she said. “When technology reduces cognitive load instead of adding to it, performance and customer loyalty follow.”
This is a trend sweeping the CX and UCaaS markets:
- Fewer tabs
- Less context switching
- More automation
- More intelligence behind the scenes
Simplicity is suddenly a competitive weapon—not because it’s pretty, but because it impacts resolution times, service quality, and employee productivity.
Engage leans heavily into this approach by streamlining routine tasks, minimizing handoff friction, and enabling both field teams and backend experts—billing, HR, IT, finance—to work in sync without hunting down missing info.
The Industry Shift: Converging CX and Internal Collaboration
The CX market has spent years treating customer-facing teams as standalone units. But the reality is customers rarely interact with just one department. A billing issue often becomes a support issue, which may require operations, which then loops in IT.
Traditional tools silo those functions.
Engage bridges them.
This shift mirrors broader moves across the market: Cloud providers, CCaaS vendors, and collaboration platforms are increasingly merging workflows that used to belong to entirely separate systems. Think of this as the “full-company CX” model—unifying customer journeys with internal expertise.
8×8 Engage is built with that premise at the center.
A Win That Signals Where Customer Engagement Is Headed
The London Design Awards win isn’t merely aesthetic validation—it underscores a market pivot. Companies want:
- Software that reflects real-world behaviors
- Tools built for mobile-first workflows
- Automatic context that removes manual effort
- Connected interactions without patchwork integrations
- AI that enhances clarity instead of adding noise
Engage does all of this without the “enterprise bloat” that often comes with unified communications platforms.
Part of Something Bigger: 8×8 Platform for CX
Engage is not a standalone product—it’s a key pillar of the broader 8×8 Platform for CX, which unifies:
- Contact center capabilities
- Unified communications
- Communications APIs
The platform’s pitch: one architecture, one experience, one operational footprint. For IT teams, that translates to fewer contracts and fewer headaches. For users, it means consistent workflows and a lower learning curve.
8×8 designed Engage specifically to extend this platform across every customer-facing role, from field ops to back-office specialists. The idea is simple: if a team touches customer experience in any way, they should use the same engagement tool—with the same context—every time.
The Bigger Picture: UX Wins That Matter in 2025
Customer experience platforms are entering a new era. It’s not enough to unify channels; vendors now need to unify the work behind those channels. Design is playing a larger role in enterprise buying decisions as teams demand tools that feel modern, fast, and human-centered.
Winning Gold at the London Design Awards positions 8×8 as one of the companies taking UX seriously—not as a feature layer, but as a core differentiator in a crowded market.
And if the industry continues to gravitate toward mobility, simplicity, and intelligent automation, platforms like Engage will be the blueprint competitors must follow.
