When you’re evaluating CPaaS providers, every vendor will tell you they’re the best. Far rarer is an independent benchmark built on what real customers report – which is what makes the Metrigy MetriStar award worth paying attention to. We’re glad to share that 8×8 has been named a 2026 MetriStar Top Provider for Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) by Metrigy, the independent research and advisory firm behind the annual Customer Experience MetriCast study.
The recognition is based on data from 1,437 CX leaders across 10 countries, evaluating providers on two things vendors can’t manufacture: measurable business success and customer sentiment. And it wasn’t the only result – 8×8 also earned MetriStar Top Provider for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) and a Business Success MetriStar for Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) in the same programme year, placing us among a small group of vendors recognised across three categories.
What the MetriStar Award Actually Measures
The MetriStar isn’t a feature checklist or an analyst opinion exercise. Metrigy surveys real customers and asks them to report before-and-after changes in revenue, customer satisfaction (CSAT), employee efficiency, and operational costs resulting from their CPaaS platform, then calculates a business success score and a customer sentiment score for each provider.
To earn Top Provider status, a vendor has to clear both bars – above-average business success and above-average customer sentiment. That’s a high hurdle: only five of the 12 individually rated CPaaS providers cleared it this year – 8×8, Bandwidth, Gupshup, RouteMobile and Twilio. Here’s what the data showed for 8×8.
#1: Strong Business Success, Led by CSAT and Revenue Growth
8×8 earned a business success score of 302 – 19 points above the 283 industry average – with customers reporting particular strength in CSAT improvement and revenue growth, ranking 8×8 among the top performers in both.
For context, across all CPaaS providers in the study, customers reported significant CSAT increases in 32.1% of deployments, significant revenue growth in 26.9%, and employee efficiency gains in 29.1%. These are real business outcomes, not vanity metrics – and 8×8 customers reported results that exceed those averages.
See how Superbank scales customer experience with 8×8.
#2: Top Scores for Platform Reliability and No-Code Quality
On the customer sentiment side, 8×8 earned an overall score of 8.42 out of 10, above the 8.36 average across all rated CPaaS providers. Our highest marks came in platform reliability (8.96) and no-code/low-code application quality (8.63) – top-two finishes across all providers in both – with integrations with key platforms and apps (8.56) close behind, reflecting 8×8’s ecosystem approach to connecting with CRM, helpdesk and workforce tools.
The no-code score is telling, because it reflects a deliberate choice: to make CPaaS usable by more than just developers. When campaign managers, CX teams and frontline staff can build and launch customer engagement workflows themselves, rather than wait on an engineering queue, reliability and quality show up in the data.
#3: One Platform for CPaaS, CCaaS and UCaaS
Metrigy highlighted 8×8’s integrated communications portfolio as a key differentiator. We’re one of only a handful of providers that offer CPaaS, CCaaS and UCaaS within a single platform – and Metrigy noted that we treat CPaaS not as a standalone developer toolkit, but as a programmable layer across the entire CX stack.
It’s the approach we hear customers asking for time and again. Most organisations aren’t shopping for a messaging API in isolation; they need the whole chain – campaign management, AI, analytics, and a contact centre that talks to all of it, sharing one data model. That’s what lets organisations interact with customers easily, empower every team across the business, and drive real operational efficiency.
The 8×8 CPaaS portfolio brings it together:
- Communication APIs – a global suite for SMS, voice, video and messaging apps, including Rich Communication Services and WhatsApp
- 8×8 Connect – a no-code platform for managing multi-channel campaigns, tracking real-time delivery analytics, and managing Sender IDs
- 8×8 Converse – an AI-powered engagement platform for two-way customer conversations across voice, messaging, social and video in a single workspace
- 8×8 AI Studio – a low-code conversational AI designer for deploying automated, multi-language agents that handle payment processing, appointment scheduling and more
- Authentication & fraud prevention – a security suite spanning Descope (CIAM), the Verification API, Omni Shield and Silent Mobile Authentication to verify users, secure logins and block messaging fraud
#4: CPaaS as the Backbone of CX, Not Just a Channel
This recognition reflects where we believe CX is heading. CPaaS is central to 8×8’s push to bring customer experience out of the contact centre and into the hands of every customer-facing team – sales, field service and frontline staff – giving them the ability to support customers on channels like WhatsApp or SMS, all connected back into the same analytics and routing engine.
As we advance that strategy, we expect CPaaS to play an increasingly fundamental role, including in support of an AI-first contact centre. We’ll keep investing in AI-driven automation, no-code tooling and pre-built templates that shrink time to value, so customers can solve their biggest CX challenges faster.
See How 8×8 Compares – Get the Full Report
The MetriStar report includes the full methodology, every score, and a provider-by-provider comparison across all rated CPaaS vendors. If you’re evaluating providers – or simply want to see exactly where 8×8 and the other Top Providers landed – it’s worth a read.
Download a complimentary copy of the Metrigy MetriStar CPaaS report to dig into the data. Or if you’d like to talk through what 8×8 CPaaS can do for your organisation, contact us – we’d love to have that conversation.
