8×8 has launched Engage, an AI-powered solution designed to support and enhance cross-organization customer engagement.
Primarily, it does so by empowering store associates, field service personnel, sales teams, and more customer-facing employees with CCaaS capabilities.
These employees are engaging with customers more and more. Indeed, an 8×8 study claims:
Almost two-thirds of business leaders surveyed say that up to 60 percent of their organization’s customer interactions take place outside of the contact center.
Recognizing this, 8×8 hopes to provide a more universal, synchronized CX – as well as elevating employee experience and loyalty.
How Does 8×8 Engage Work?
Leveraging AI to perform deep data analysis, 8×8 Engage identifies areas in which customer-facing employees – outside the contact center – need more support.
From there, it highlights tools within the 8×8 XCaaS ecosystem that will help fill the void and improve the customer and employee experience.
Included among the 8×8 Engage features are:
- Integration and data synchronization: Compatible with native and third-party enterprise apps, Engage can automate an agent’s workflow and provide users with relevant, easily accessible data.
- Speech analytics and interaction summarization: Powered by AI, these features can help reduce workload, freeing agents up to provide a superior customer experience.
- Single-platform capabilities: By utilizing its existing CCaaS and UCaaS toolkits, 8×8 will provide customer-facing agents with a unified interface – allowing for a seamless CX.
Commenting on the potential of the new tool, Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, stated:
“Delivering increased customer satisfaction and great experiences is not limited to the contact center but is everyone’s responsibility in an organization. Seamlessly integrating the underserved CX professionals outside of the contact center into the customer experience journey is pivotal, and that requires empowering them with the correct set of tools and data.
With 8×8 Engage, we are bridging the customer experience gaps within an organization by eliminating the silos that have traditionally existed between unified communications, the contact center, and different technology vendors.
Those CX gaps come despite 98 percent of business leaders viewing CX as an organization-wide initiative. In addition, 92 percent acknowledge the need for cross-departmental CX initiatives.
Yet, only six percent believed that CX consistency was currently being achieved company-wide.
To overcome this issue, 8×8 Engage synchronizes CX across multiple departments.
Indeed, the solution is customizable to specific users/departments, separating it from a basic universal system that just connects different systems together.
Organizations have the flexibility to tailor their experiences in Engage by incorporating or eliminating features.
Moreover, team leaders can enhance their understanding of customers through the examination of comprehensive reports – utilizing visual representations that simplify data presentation.
Will It Engage Buyers?
8×8 has struggled to gain momentum in recent times, with CEO Samuel Wilson admitting the company was nearing its revenue low point during its latest earnings call.
Yet, Wilson remains enthusiastic about a bounce back, teasing a new “CX product line”.
While he did not name 8×8 Engage directly, Wilson’s assertion that the new products would provide “intentionally engineered capabilities that empower every customer-facing employee to make the most of every interaction” resonates with Engage’s specs.
However, Engage may only be one of the first “new products” 8×8 releases in 2024…
