8×8 has announced a string of AI updates to its contact center platform, which will lead to greater customer experiences.
The 8×8 Contact Center has gained 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant and 8×8 Supervisor Workspace, and OpenAI has been integrated into its 8×8 ‘XCaaS’ (eXperience Communications as a Service) platform.
These technologies will bring enhanced AI/ML, performance capabilities, and natural language understanding models to the 8×8 Contact Center and across the XCaaS platform.
Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst at Metrigy, commented:
Transforming into an AI-powered contact center is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity for companies that want to deliver stellar customer experience and gain competitive advantage.
“Our research clearly shows that investing in AI, platform integration, and more efficient operational processes delivers results.
“For example, conversational AI alone improves revenue by 20.7 percent, customer ratings by 26.7 percent, and agent productivity by 22.7 percent.
“Companies with such success rates invest 92.2 percent more than unsuccessful companies on CX technologies.”
8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant
The 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant enables companies to offer customers smart self-service to deal with customer requests using natural language.
Harnessing the new technology, companies can quickly build and deploy chatbots across any channel, including WhatsApp and SMS.
Moreover, they may create conversation flows for any channel in over 100 languages and utilize actionable insights to optimize performance using the in-built analytics solution.
Businesses may also send context from the customer-bot conversation to live agents – when the customer escalates – to prevent blind transfers and provide a smoother experience.
Finally, they can connect with OpenAI and other AI engines, as well as integrate with CRM systems and enterprise applications.
8×8 Supervisor Workspace
8×8 Supervisor Workspace provides contact center supervisors with AI-based decision intelligence and guidance to make quick corrections and bolster overall performance.
The new addition also provides personalized environments with simple clicks to improve leadership decision-making within contact centers.
Operations can also create multiple workspaces to make it easier for supervisors to change roles and meet demand more quickly.
In addition, they may speed up operations using new user-friendly designs and role-based templates.
Lastly, supervisors may access insights via a “single pane of glass”, including integrations with third-party applications via BI tools, WFM, and CRM.
8×8 XCaaS OpenAI Integration
The combination of 8×8 and OpenAI Whisper will bring accurate transcriptions, translations, and summarisations to the 8×8 XCaaS platform.
According to 8×8, integrating OpenAI, alongside 8×8 Quality Management and Speech Analytics for Contact Center and 8×8 Conversation IQ will produce a transcription accuracy of over 85 percent for popular languages out of a total of 50 languages across UCaaS and CCaaS.
By incorporating generative AI, organizations will be able to better understand and communicate with their customers.
8×8 Doubles Down on CCaaS
The latest updates to 8×8’s contact center appear to confirm predictions that 8×8 is strengthening the CCaaS wing of its business.
With former CFO Samuel Wilson taking over from David Sipes late last year, there has been speculation that the company’s renewed business strategy places a lot of value on the contact center industry.
Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, said at the time: “All of the comms vendors have seen the same [stock drops] during Sipes’s tenure.
“From my discussions with industry folks, this was about a difference in strategy.
“The board wants to move to a CC-first approach where Sipes has been focused on having UC lead XCaaS”
Time will tell if the switch from a UC-first to a CC-first approach will pay off, as well as whether this is certainly the company’s intention. In this instance, 8×8 may simply be reacting to the wave of AI updates brought about partly by OpenAI’s revolutionary technology.
There is no smoke without fire, however, and more recently, 8×8’s Interim CEO, Samuel Wilson, is quoted as saying during the company’s third-quarter fiscal 2023 earnings call:
“The first and most important thing, and we have not done a great job of this yet, is cross-selling our contact center into that UC base.”
It seems 2023 may well be the year of the contact center for 8×8, so expect the innovations to keep rolling in.
