8×8, Inc. (NASDAQ: EGHT), a leading business communications, CX, and CPaaS platform provider, today announced the expanded availability of AI-powered voice support for 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant, adding to the already available digital capabilities and helping to drive increased 8×8 customer adoption and usage. 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant, a powerful, user-friendly conversational AI solution that equips organizations with virtual agents, enables businesses to create instant, effortless, and engaging self-service experiences, now supports human-like voice as well as digital interactions across multiple regions and languages to deliver automation and personalized experiences at scale.
AI-powered voice self-service enables the automation of customer interactions to rapidly resolve a wide range of use cases and issues, such as managing healthcare appointments, sales support and order management for retail purchases, paying utility and financial service bills, solving routine IT issues in professional services organizations, and managing travel and hospitality reservations. The conversational and accurate support provided by voice support for 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant, enables organizations to improve operational efficiency while also increasing the rates of first contact resolution (FCR) and customer satisfaction (CSAT).
“Implementing 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant to handle easy, repetitive calls has greatly improved our operations, especially for our third-party team,” said Peter Hare, IT Support Technician at Activate Group. “Reducing the number of calls routed through to the team by 46% by using the AI-powered technology has led to quicker responses as less time is spent waiting in a queue, and the repetitive questions can be answered by the bot, saving up to a minute per call. Ultimately this has boosted customer satisfaction.”
As 8×8 continues to enhance Conversational AI capabilities, the number of customers using 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant to power self-service use cases has increased over 200% year-over-year as of the quarter ending June 30, 2024, resulting in the associated volume of digital and voice self-service interactions growing more than 200% for the quarter on a year-over-year basis and more than one million interactions conducted on the platform to date.
“CX leaders recognize that intelligent virtual assistants can often resolve simple issues faster, while freeing up contact center 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,” said Sheila McGee-Smith, founder and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics. “With 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant for both voice and digital, organizations 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.”
In addition to now offering fully intelligent virtual agent capabilities powering a wide range of simple and complex use cases, voice support for 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant can respond to intent and provide human-like responses. This allows the solution to rapidly resolve a broad range of customer issues without the need for human intervention. As a result, processes that would normally require human intervention can be automated to reduce operational costs while providing instant 24/7 service.
“The implementation of 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant for Voice has saved £40,000 annually and improved our call handling success rate to over 80%,” said Christie Jones, project lead at Oldham Council. “Our multi-skilled agents can now manage calls seamlessly alongside their other tasks, reducing idle time and improving overall operational efficiency. Next steps are to investigate which other contact center services can benefit from using conversational AI technology to improve efficiency and the customer experience.”
Key features of voice self-service for 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant include:
- Streamline Workflows: From automated voice self-service experiences to live agent assistance, interaction workflows are seamless and minimize the need for manual data collection.
- Complete Customer Context: Eliminate blind transfers as the voicebot interaction context is delivered to the agent upon connection, empowering them to deliver more personalized, frictionless experiences.
- Build and Deploy Rapidly: Using graphical scripting tools, a single bot can be quickly built and deployed across any channel such as voice, WhatsApp, SMS, and web chat, among others.
- Rich Conversation Insights: Built-in, comprehensive analytics deliver insights and intuitive monitoring and reporting for advanced customer journey visibility.
- Turnkey Integration Options: Marketplace and turnkey integrations with CRMs allow for endless customization for a highly personalized customer experience within a voicebot interaction.
“As customer demands and expectations continue to change, it’s imperative that organizations meet these expectations head on by providing enhanced, seamless support and customer service options,” said Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, Inc. “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 organizations to engage with their customers through highly personalized, readily available services and support.”
8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant is delivered as part of the 8×8 cloud contact center and unified communications platform, which includes cloud contact center, business phone, video meetings, team chat, outbound messaging, secure payment capture, and SMS capabilities. The 8×8 platform is a resilient, secure, and compliant platform, offering the highest levels of reliability with a financially backed, platform-wide 99.999% uptime SLA across an integrated cloud UCaaS and CCaaS solution.