8x8 has released four feature updates to pull together its enterprise communications portfolio.
By announcing each as part of one coordinated release, 8x8 aims to support businesses in unifying their fragmented customer service stack.
With this theme front of mind, here’s a sneak peek of 8x8’s latest release.
1. 8x8 JourneyIQ: A New Tool to Centralize Data from Across the Comms Stack
8x8 JourneyIQ connects data from across the vendor’s CCaaS, UCaaS, and CPaaS solutions.
In doing so, the solution pulls data from various journey touchpoints into a single customer view.
The innovation will drive most value for midmarket companies with multiple departments interacting with customers.
Many businesses struggle to track these engagements, creating CX blind spots and missed opportunities to improve the customer journey.
After making this point, Sheila McGee-Smith, Founder & Principal Analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, noted:
8x8 JourneyIQ allows organizations to cut through all the complexity and unify every customer touchpoint, both inside and outside of the contact center, to provide a single, real-time view.
"It's no longer enough to react after a poor customer experience; organizations need the intelligence and ability to proactively identify and prevent issues to transform the customer journey," she concluded.
2. 8x8 Brings RCS to CCaaS
RCS is the next evolution of SMS, enabling rich media, typing indicators, group chats, and more – with Apple now supporting RCS on its native messaging app.
8x8 contact center customers may now leverage the channel to engage in two-way conversations, upgrade the messaging experience, and run analytics across the channel.
Notably, 8x8 also allows for branded messaging. That’s an excellent feature for customer service teams engaging in proactive messaging.
After all, customers often contact customer service only to authenticate a message they recieved. At one point, Gartner estimated that two-thirds of consumers had contacted customer service after receiving proactive notifications from a brand.
Branded messaging gives them confidence that outreach is genuine.
Sharing his perspective on the announcement, Dave Michels, Founder of TalkingPointz, said:
Many of the CPaaS providers are talking about how RCS is taking off as a preferred channel for brands, but I haven't heard any of the CCaaS providers embrace RCS as part of their omnichannel comms -- until now.
"RCS took so long that it actually snuck up on us. Almost every cellular user will be RCS enabled by the end of this year - and it's already ubiquitous in several countries," he summarized.
With its CPaaS backbone, 8x8 can quickly pull these new channels into its contact center environment and run automation over them.
3. 8x8 Empowers External Employees with More Contact Center Tools
12 months ago, 8x8 launched Engage to empower business-wide UCaaS users – who “engage” with customers - access to CCaaS capabilities.