8×8 is integrating its AI-powered voice self-service capability to its 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant.
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The AI self-service feature allows customers to rapidly resolve issues like managing healthcare appointments, sales support, order management for retail purchases, paying bills, fixing IT issues, and managing reservations in travel and hospitality.
According to 8×8, the feature strengthens the Intelligent Customer Assistant by enhancing operational efficiency and increasing first contact resolution (FCR) and customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Sheila McGee-Smith, Founder and Principal Analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, explains how the solution also helps to boost customer experiences:
“CX leaders recognise that intelligent virtual assistants can often resolve simple issues faster, while freeing up contact centre agents to manage more complex customer interactions.
“As consumers become more comfortable interacting with virtual assistants, businesses are increasingly confident deploying customer-facing AI-powered self-service technologies.
“With 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant for both voice and digital, organisations can leverage a complete conversational AI solution while always ensuring that a human agent will be available, with full interaction context, to deliver an elevated level of customer experience at scale.”
Key Features
The key features of the voice self-service feature for 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant include streamlining workflows, adding customer context, rapid building and deployment, rich conversational insights, and ready-made integration options:
- You can streamline workflows, such as automated voice self-service experiences and live agents assistance, reducing the need for manual data collection.
- With comprehensive customer context, the self-service capability prevents ‘blind transfers’ as the voicebot interaction is shared with the agent when the customer is passed across to them, resulting in a more frictionless experience.
- Graphical scripting tools enable bots to be rapidly built and deployed across channels like SMS, WhatsApp, voice, and web chat, and more.
- Rich conversational insights and reporting for advanced customer journey visibility can be derived from the solution’s built-in analytics.
- Marketplace and ready-made integrations with CRMs lead to more personalized customer experiences during interactions with voicebots.
Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, sees this self-service capability as another engagement option to keep customers happy:
“As customer demands and expectations continue to change, it’s imperative that organisations meet these expectations head on by providing enhanced, seamless support and customer service options.
“Whether it’s managing a retail order, scheduling a healthcare appointment, help assembling a new product, or any number of other customer support issues, by adding voice support to 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant we are providing yet another way for organisations to engage with their customers through highly personalised, readily available services and support.”
8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant
The number of customers using 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant for self-service have reportedly grown by more than 200 percent year-over-year, which 8×8 believes has led to the volume of digital and voice self-service interactions also increasing by over 200 percent, with more than one million interactions having been carried out on the platform so far.
8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant is a conversational AI solution that enables businesses to integrate virtual agents that can engage with customers.
The offering now supports a human-like voice and interactions across multiple regions and languages.
The assistant is part of the 8×8 cloud contact centre and unified communications platform, which also includes a cloud contact centre, business phone, video meetings, team chat, outbound messaging, secure payment capture, and SMS.
