8×8 has made sweeping enhancements across its CCaaS platform, adding AI-powered voice self-service and extending its Salesforce integration.
The vendor also released enhancements to contact center video, scripting functions, and workspaces, alongside updates to its CPaaS and UCaaS capabilities.
Excited to share these “XCaaS” announcements, Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, said: “At 8×8 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.
“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.
Middleton continued:
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 centre or elsewhere, which leads to overall happier customers and employees, and positive business growth.
CCaaS Innovations
AI-powered voice self-service is now available for 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant. That enables businesses to map contact center journeys across digital and voice channels, minimize wait times, and provide instant access to highly personalized, natural interactions.
Contact center agents can now switch customer interactions to video from within the 8×8 Agent Workspace, where the vendor has also embedded native call-handling features.
A deeper Salesforce integration is also part of the release, allowing 8×8 Contact Center and Salesforce customers to send and receive SMS and WhatsApp messages.
New 8×8 scripting functions also allow admins to build out questions and quick replies to customers via web chat. These route back to agents, giving the context required to communicate live with customers.
Finally, the 8×8 Supervisor Workspace – first released in March this year – now includes interaction retrieval pages and access to Barge, Monitor, and Whisper within the Agent Table Widget.
It also offers enhanced filtering, a new widget showing trends in accepted interactions, multiple page creation and management, the option to change agent statuses, plus support for the French-Canadian language.
CPaaS Innovations
As teased last month, the new 8×8 Omni Shield solution enables companies to protect their customers from fraudulent SMS activity through automated fraud alerts, real-time notifications, live traffic monitoring, and instant phone number assessments.
Meanwhile, 8×8 Voice now allows customers to build automated phone systems to handle routing calls, capturing phone numbers, and more.
In addition, Smart Channel Routing locates telecom operators, which can provide a more cost-effective alternative to route SMS messages.
8×8 Chat Apps now include the Zalo Notification Service (ZNS), allowing businesses to send personalized notifications to users in Vietnam.
Moreover, 8×8 Connect has added the capability to let agents track the progress of their SMS Sender ID registration requests.
Next, 8×8 App to App Calling with automated fallback to the PSTN enables greater call reliability, access to voice logs on 8×8 Connect, and the ability to create customer call flows.
Lastly, Communication API Enhancements include improved WhatsApp reporting on 8×8 Connect, multi-browser support for 8×8 Video Interactions, as well as 2FA on 8×8 Converse.
UCaaS Innovations
8×8 has announced the 8×8 Phone App for Microsoft Teams, which enables PSTN calling without the need for per-user Teams Phone licenses, desktop plugins, or additional software outside of Teams. Using 8×8’s direct routing service, it provides native calling within Teams.
According to 8×8, it is simple for IT to deploy and manage and flexible for organizations to customize licensing costs to meet their business needs.
8×8 also launched video enhancements in the form of a video meeting solution for up to 10,000 participants at events such as town halls, auctions, and other large audience events. Moreover, 8×8 meetings will have the option of turning off video hardware acceleration to improve shared content legibility and support for the modern AV1 video codec.
Work usability and interface enhancements include new call recording filters, the possibility of importing personal or company contacts from Office 365 and Outlook into 8×8 Work for desktop, an improved microphone Automatic Gain Control (AGC), and embedded call quality alerts for the status of connections.
The vendor also extended its XCaaS Global Reach platform to include two new global carriers in Hong Kong and South Africa to provide more effective local support and improved redundancy.
Elsewhere, 8×8 doubled down on XCaaS yet shifted its strategy for selling its CCaaS-UCaaS-CPaaS portfolio.
