New 8x8 XCaaS Cloud Contact Center and Unified Communications Platform Innovations Create Tailored, Enhanced Customer and Employee Experiences
- 8x8 introduces AI-powered voice self-service for enhanced customer experiences. The addition of voice expands the capabilities of 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant, enabling businesses to create personalized, natural interactions across digital and voice channels. Contact center agents can now elevate customer interactions to video directly within 8x8 Agent Workspace, enhancing first contact resolution. The integration with Microsoft Teams allows for cost-effective PSTN calling without additional licenses. The new enhancements aim to improve customer experiences and optimize business needs.
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New Platform Enhancements Include AI-powered Voice Conversational Self-Service Capabilities, Video Customer Engagement, Deeper Microsoft Teams Integrations, and New Meeting Capabilities
New generally available updates for 8x8 Contact Center include:
- AI-powered Voice Self-Service Enhances Customer Experiences: Recently announced, voice self-service is now available for 8x8’s conversational AI solution, 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant. The addition of voice expands 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant’s powerful, user-friendly AI self-service capabilities that enable businesses to create simple to complex experiences across digital and voice channels that help minimize wait times, and provide instant access to highly personalized, natural interactions.
- 8x8 Agent Workspace Enhancements & Video Elevated Customer Support: Contact center agents can now elevate customer interactions to video directly within 8x8 Agent Workspace, allowing customers to visually help agents troubleshoot issues through their mobile devices. The new solution embeds 8x8 secure video interaction capabilities directly into 8x8 Contact Center, allowing organizations to easily and seamlessly add video for enhanced first contact resolution. Further, call handling is now directly within 8x8 Agent Workspace, without the need for an external hard phone or softphone.
- Customizable Solutions for Customers: The 8x8 Technology Partner Ecosystem provides a carefully curated network of Independent Software Vendors, Value Added Resellers, and Systems Integrators that can solve specific customer experience use cases. Technology partners provide integrations that feel native in 8x8 to enhance customer experiences through cutting-edge technologies with AI and persistent data.
- Deeper Salesforce Integration: Customers using 8x8 Contact Center and Salesforce are now able to set up, configure, route, initiate (SMS Only), and reply to SMS and WhatsApp messages within the 8x8 Integration for Salesforce.
- 8x8 Webchat Quick Replies: Using 8x8 scripting functions, admins can build out questions and quick replies to interact with customers; all of which can then be routed back to an agent providing the necessary context to begin the live conversation. This is useful for customers that don’t need an AI-powered chatbot, but still want to give customers menu options to route them to the right agent.
- 8x8 Supervisor Workspace Enhancements: Includes the addition of interaction retrieval pages, access to barge, monitor, and whisper functionality within the Agent Table widget, enhanced filtering; a new widget highlighting trends in accepted interactions, ability to create and manage multiple pages, ability to change agent status; and support for French Canadian language.
Enhancements for 8x8 Unified Communications include:
- Deeper Native Integrations with Microsoft Teams: Recently announced, 8x8 Phone App for Microsoft Teams is a cost-effective and native Teams-first experience enabling PSTN calling without requiring per user Teams Phone licenses, installing desktop plugins, or running additional software outside of Teams. Built on 8x8’s direct routing service, it unlocks native calling functionality within Teams that is intuitive for users across devices, simple for IT to manage and deploy, and flexible for organizations to optimize licensing costs for business needs.
- 8x8 Video Enhancements: New beta program for up to 10,000 meeting participants, providing an optimized interface and customization options to support large audience events such as company-wide town halls, or for specific use cases such as auctions and other large audience events. Additionally, 8x8 meetings now provide the option to turn off video hardware acceleration, resulting in improved shared content legibility and support for the modern AV1 video codec.
- 8x8 Work Usability and Interface Enhancements: Includes enhanced call recording filters, the ability to import personal or company contacts from Office 365 and Outlook into 8x8 Work for desktop, enhanced microphone Automatic Gain Control (AGC), and an embedded call quality alert for connection status.
Enhancements to 8x8 CPaaS communication APIs include:
- SMS Fraud Prevention: Recently introduced, the 8x8 Omni Shield solution allows enterprises to proactively safeguard their customers from fraudulent SMS activity. Part of the 8x8 CPaaS portfolio, 8x8 Omni Shield is seamlessly integrated with real-time messaging, across web and mobile applications, and proactively detects and prevents fraudulent activities through automated fraud alerts, real-time notifications, live traffic monitoring, and instant phone number assessments.
- Voice IVR Capabilities: 8x8 Voice solutions now enable customers to build an automated phone system that handles actions such as routing calls and capturing phone numbers in order to provide users with real-time information through self-service, or automatically routing calls to an agent for further support.
- Smart Channel Routing: 8x8’s unique Smart Channel Routing feature identifies telecom operators that are charging premium SMS rates based on predefined operator settings, seamlessly routing these SMS messages to more cost effective alternatives such as other messaging channels, without requiring any technical modifications or additional setup.
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Zalo Notification Services: Now available as part of the 8x8 Chat Apps offering, the Zalo Notification Service (ZNS) enables businesses to send customer-centric and personalized notifications, such as real-time alerts, one-time passwords (OTPs), account updates, and more, to users in
Vietnam . - Sender ID Dashboard on 8x8 Connect: Agents can now track the process of their SMS Sender ID registration by operator on 8x8 Connect, providing businesses with visibility into the status of their registration requests, understanding whether there are any issues or delays, and allowing for efficient troubleshooting.
- 8x8 Voice API Enhancements: 8x8 App to App Calling with automated fallback to Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) for enhanced call reliability, access to comprehensive voice logs on 8x8 Connect, and the ability to create customer call flows while incorporating specific actions such as sending voice messages or text-to-speech.
- 8x8 Communication API Enhancements: Enhanced WhatsApp reporting on 8x8 Connect, multi-browser support for 8x8 Video Interactions, and two-factor authentication on 8x8 Converse.
The 8x8 XCaaS platform Global Reach™ capabilities were also extended and will include onboarding two new global carriers in
“At 8x8 we are committed to providing our customers with a customer engagement, communications and collaboration platform that not only offers the highest levels of innovation, but is reliable and easy to use,” said Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8x8, Inc. “Our highly tailored and seamless integrated cloud contact center and unified communications platform, not only improves employee and customer communications and collaboration, but it does away with disjointed, siloed information and resources. Instead, everyone across the entire organization is empowered to provide the best possible experiences for their customers, regardless of whether they sit in the contact center or elsewhere, which leads to overall happier customers and employees, and positive business growth.”
8x8 XCaaS includes integrated cloud contact center, business phone, video meetings, team chat, and SMS capabilities in a single-vendor solution. 8x8 XCaaS is built on a resilient, secure, and compliant platform, which offers the highest levels of reliability with financially backed, platform-wide 99.999 percent uptime SLA across an integrated cloud UCaaS and CCaaS solution.
8x8 customers can register for the upcoming 8x8 webinar to learn more about the latest customer and employee experience enhancements to the 8x8 XCaaS platform.
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 8x8’s periodic and other reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for a description of such risks and uncertainties. 8x8 undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.
About 8x8, Inc.
8x8, Inc. (NASDAQ: EGHT) is transforming the future of business communications as a leading Software as a Service provider of 8x8 XCaaS™ (Experience Communications as a Service™), an integrated contact center, voice communications, video, chat, and SMS solution built on one global cloud communications platform. 8x8 uniquely eliminates the silos between Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) to power the communications requirements of all employees globally as they work together to deliver differentiated customer experiences. For additional information, visit www.8x8.com, or follow 8x8 on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
8x8®, 8x8 XCaaS™, Experience Communications as a Service™, Experience Communications Platform™ are trademarks of 8x8, Inc.
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