8×8 has announced it is launching Frontdesk, a new XCaaS composed experience for high volume call handling.
8×8 made the announcement at this year’s Enterprise Connect event, with Frontdesk aiming to transform the receptionist role by delivering a tailored experience and user interface that uniquely blends traditional unified communications and contact centre capabilities.
It provides powerful call queuing and handling features that enhance productivity and personalize engagement for a hybrid work environment, and was recently named a finalist in the overall Best of Enterprise Connect 2021.
Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, said: “As businesses embrace hybrid work environments, the traditional receptionist or front desk role now requires the same flexibility and movability of any other role within the organization.
“By developing a purpose-built, native solution that leverages communications, collaboration, and customer engagement features from 8×8 XCaaS, 8×8 Frontdesk is empowering organisations to create a very personalized and empathetic experience for their employees and customers. This ensures that every first customer contact is a great one by eliminating traditional limitations and restrictions previously associated with this role.”
8×8 Frontdesk leverages the single-vendor, integrated employee communications and customer engagement capabilities of 8×8 XCaaS and is natively enabled within the 8×8 Work app. This eliminates the need for additional applications to install or support, and also removes any dependency on additional third-party solutions. 8×8 Frontdesk offers organisation-wide visibility into the status and availability of the entire workforce with the ability to filter users by site – spanning standard 8×8 extensions and Microsoft Teams users – and connecting incoming callers to employees and call queues. It also enables the receptionist and front desk function to be assigned or delegated to any user, regardless of role, location, or device.
The 8×8 Frontdesk tailored user interface is designed to maximise productivity, enabling receptionists and front desk staff to answer calls efficiently regardless of location or device, access a custom view of expert resources to consult, and connect calls using single-click interactions. It also significantly reduces training costs, speeding user adoption and time to value.
8×8 Frontdesk features and benefits include:
- One App for All Scenarios: Natively accessible from 8×8 Work, which includes voice, video meetings, team chat, and more in a single, integrated desktop application, 8×8 Frontdesk is easily enabled as an additional wide-screen viewer mode that is purpose-built specifically for the receptionist role. This eliminates the need to learn and use an additional app.
- Personalised Solution for Every User: Provides custom filters to tailor each user’s target contact list with the ability to annotate personal information for each contact and select the preferred ‘away from desk’ mode.
- Centralised Answering for Both Employee and Contact Center Agent User Groups: Leverages the integrated 8×8 eXperience Communications Platform that spans across the organisation to personalise call answering for specific user groups.
- Intuitive User Interface: Allows receptionists and front office staff to stack, prioritise, and manage multiple calls simultaneously from anywhere, directly in the 8×8 Work desktop app. Automatic contact-filtering of the enterprise directory, based on the site location dialed, enables fast pick-and-click transfers to a localized user list.
- Robust Queue Management: Unifies the view of multiple call queues, spanning both general inquiry business lines, and campaign or service-specific numbers.
- Click-to-Call and Chat: Delivers robust call queueing, advanced organisation-wide transfers, and messaging capabilities at the click of a mouse.
- Holistic View of All Extensions, Agents and Call Queues: Provides organisation-wide status of all users and call queues, including presence sync with Microsoft Teams via the 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams direct routing solution.
- Device Agnostic with No Hardware Required: Software solution that is not dependent on specific console or deskphone hardware from a third party, eliminating the need for complex and costly multi-vendor solutions.
- Location-independent: Extends the receptionist role to any 8×8 Work user across the organisation.
