8×8, Inc. (NASDAQ: EGHT), a leading integrated cloud communications platform provider, today announced new AI-driven enhancements that transform business and contact center performance through enhanced customer experiences. The new capabilities include 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant and 8×8 Supervisor Workspace for 8×8 Contact Center as well as a platform-wide integration with OpenAI. By infusing deeper AI/ML, natural language understanding models, and performance capabilities into 8×8 Contact Center, and across the 8×8 XCaaS™ (eXperience Communications as a Service™) integrated cloud communications and contact center platform, 8×8 enables customer-obsessed organizations to build exceptional customer journeys, enhance team productivity, and empower leaders with advanced real-time insights.
“Transforming into an AI-powered contact center is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity for companies that want to deliver stellar customer experience and gain competitive advantage,” said Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst at Metrigy. “Our research clearly shows that investing in AI, platform integration, and more efficient operational processes delivers results. For example, conversational AI alone improves revenue by 20.7%, customer ratings by 26.7%, and agent productivity by 22.7%. Companies with such success rates invest 92.2% more than unsuccessful companies on CX technologies.”
New 8×8 capabilities include:
8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant
8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant is a powerful, user-friendly conversational AI solution that enables businesses to create simple to complex self-service experiences across all channels. Part of 8×8 Contact Center, 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant provides graphical orchestration capabilities that allow enterprises to build highly scalable, always available, consistent experiences across multiple regions and languages, with very little extra effort. With 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant, organizations can:
- Deliver smart self-service to automatically handle customer requests through natural, conversational experiences.
- Utilize graphical scripting tools, enabling a single chatbot to be built quickly and deployed instantly across any channel (i.e., SMS, WhatsApp, web chat, etc.).
- Build conversation flows once that can be applied to any channel, in 100+ languages.
- Capture reliable, actionable insights for true performance optimization via the built-in, comprehensive analytics solution.
- Eliminate blind transfers with customer context and bot interaction details delivered to a live agent, empowering them to deliver more personalized, frictionless experiences.
- Leverage turnkey integrations with CRM systems and other enterprise applications or connect with leading generative AI engines such as OpenAI, all accessible from a simple app ecosystem.
“Taking advantage of AI-based technologies for self-service has shown great potential, but in practice have been frustrating to deploy and use,” said Gary Boucher, Acer Program Manager. “We chose 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant over other vendors because of its robust features and ease of use. The overall simplicity belies its complexity on the back end. Additionally, it offers us the option to escalate to live assistance, when necessary, with a seamless handoff from the automated interaction to the contact center agent.”
8×8 Supervisor Workspace
8×8 Supervisor Workspace is a purpose-built experience that blends analytics, performance management, and team admin capabilities into a single interface. A powerful and intuitive, design-led user interface provides a performance-centric management space for contact center leaders. Key features include:
- AI-driven decision intelligence, assistance, and guidance presenting supervisors with coaching and performance recommendations to improve speed to correction and drive superior performance in the contact center.
- Personalized environments, all with simple clicks, based upon individual needs and priorities, transforming how contact center leaders can manage teams and make decisions.
- Ability to create multiple workspaces, making it easier to switch roles and responsibilities quickly to increase efficiency and become more agile in meeting business demands.
- User-friendly design and out of the box role-based templates that accelerate on-boarding and allow supervisors to quickly ramp up.
- Single pane of glass for all contact center insights and operations, including seamless integration with third-party applications and data from WFM, CRM, and BI tools.
“An unexpected challenge of supervising a contact center team is simply managing the multiple applications that are needed for task management, team overview, and metrics and analytics,” said Rohena Sharma, Team Leader at Brent Council. “8×8 Supervisor Workspace removes that challenge, allowing me to view and manage the teams, and all related information, in a single screen. It’s amazing how much time is saved, and how much more productive I can be, when I’m not switching between a dozen different applications!”
8×8 XCaaS Platform and OpenAI Integration
8×8 and OpenAI Whisper will bring industry leading, highly accurate transcription, translation, and summarization services to the 8×8 XCaaS platform. Paired with 8×8 Quality Management and Speech Analytics for Contact Center and 8×8 Conversation IQ, this new integration will bring a transcription accuracy rate higher than 85% for the most common languages and will support more than 50 languages across both UCaaS and CCaaS. This 8×8 XCaaS platform-wide integration with OpenAI will make it easier for organizations to unlock the potential of generative AI at scale and understand and interact with their customers on a much more personal level.
“Customers are turning to cloud-first environments because they offer fast, personalized solutions that then allow them to operate in the way, and across the channels, that make the most sense for their business – there is no one size fits all in enterprise,” said Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, Inc. “These AI-driven innovations to the 8×8 XCaaS platform provide our customers with the easily designable tools they need to meet their customers whenever, and wherever, to deliver the most consistent experience possible. Whether it’s conversational AI and a highly effective self-service product, a highly composable, personalized contact center experience for supervisors, or accurate and dynamic intelligence across the entire platform, 8×8 XCaaS delivers a modern platform to meet their present and future business requirements.”
8×8 XCaaS, which includes integrated cloud contact center, business phone, team chat, video meetings, and SMS capabilities, is built on the resilient, secure, and compliant 8×8 eXperience Communications Platform™, which offers the highest levels of reliability with a financially backed, platform-wide 99.999 percent uptime SLA across an integrated cloud UCaaS and CCaaS solution.
8×8 Webinar
Register for the 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant launch webinar, “Not Your Average Chatbot: Self-Service Reimagined” with Sheila McGee-Smith, founder and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, and Patrick Russell, Director of Product Management at 8×8, on Wednesday, March 22, 2023, to learn how conversational AI and other advancements are changing the future of self-service. Visit the webinar page for more information.
Caution Concerning Forward-Looking Statements
This press release contains forward-looking statements. Readers are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events or our actual results to differ materially from those expressed in any such forward-looking statements. Readers are directed to 8×8’s periodic and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a description of such risks and uncertainties. 8×8 undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.
