8×8, Inc., a leading business communications, CX, and Communications Platform as a Service provider, announced recent innovations and enhancements to the 8×8 cloud platform. The latest innovations include highly accurate AI-powered transcriptions in 8×8 Contact Center, improved call quality for Azure virtual desktop environments, and more extensive customer engagement capabilities. The CX-driven capabilities enable business leaders to drive enhanced experiences and engagement across the entire organization, for both the customers and employees.
According to the recent Metrigy report, Customer Experience Optimization 2024-25, companies overwhelmingly see improvements through the use of AI with revenue up 17.9%, customer ratings up 22.3% and agent efficiency up 21.8%. Companies also estimate AI is currently resolving about 20% of customer interactions.
Recent platform innovations to enhance customer and employee engagement include:
- Increased AI-powered Language Support and Accuracy for 8×8 Contact Center: Significant advancements to language support and real-time accuracy powered by the latest OpenAI Whisper model, delivering best-in-class accuracy for select languages and stronger performance with different accents. 8×8 also doubled the number of supported languages for live web chats, extending real-time chat translation to a broader global audience to foster more seamless multilingual interactions. Expanded text-to-speech capabilities offer support for over 40 languages, unlocking enhanced analytics, interaction insights and performance metrics that span the 8×8 platform, and empower a wide range of users to drive increased efficiency, boost employee productivity, and elevate customer satisfaction.
- 8×8 Contact Center Video Elevation: Video Elevation provides agents with one-way video capabilities directly in the contact center to allow customers to share their mobile camera, enabling agents to visually assess, for example, damage to a property rental or to see where a customer is in the process of assembling a product. 8×8 Contact Center Video Elevation helps agents troubleshoot issues more effectively, especially when there are language barriers or uncertainty about an issue’s specific geographical location, as agents can capture exact geolocations and even screenshots of what is being shown.
- Extended Availability of 8×8 Supervisor Workspace: The latest release of 8×8 Supervisor Workspace introduces a customizable, easy-to-use, and intuitive user interface to enhance contact center performance with personalized, automated supervisor experiences. Available on both desktop and through an intuitive mobile experience, 8×8 Supervisor Workspace centralizes visibility and actions while offering insights, assistance, and guidance, enabling contact center leaders to view, monitor, and manage agent and queue activity efficiently.
- Improved Quality for Azure Virtual Desktop Environments: 8×8 Work, for both desktop and web, are now integrated with Azure to improve the quality of audio calls. This optimization is specifically designed for telephony users working within an Azure Virtual Desktop environment.
- Bulk Messaging Support: SMS messages can now be sent to up to 50 numbers or contacts at once in 8×8 Work, specifically benefiting industries, such as recruiting, that require the ability to send the same message to multiple contacts. Additionally, a bulk SMS message room is created to provide details around when and to whom each message was sent allowing recipients and responses to be managed individually.
- Enhanced Call Queue Management: The new Public API for call queues provides real-time and historical analytics data directly in 8×8 Work, enabling team leaders to take quick action and proactively support users.
- 8×8 CPaaS Integration with Descope CIAM: 8×8’s partnership with Descope, a drag-and-drop customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform, empowers businesses to enhance security, outsmart fraud, and deliver a secure, frictionless experience for customers. With Descope’s no-code visual workflows, businesses can effortlessly create and customize entire user journeys, integrate authentication, authorization, and identity management into any app, and effectively prevent fraud and bot attacks.
- Voice Bots for Billing and Payments: 8×8 voice bots streamline billing by automating payment reminders, debt negotiations, and more, reducing manual labor costs. Organizations can boost responsiveness through number anonymization, follow up with SMS, and by capturing every interaction with call recording and speech recognition.
“Our continued pace of innovation is a testament to 8×8’s commitment to delivering the latest in CX-driven enhancements to our customers every single day,” said Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, Inc. “With each update, we are not just keeping up with the demands of the market, we are anticipating them. By investing in AI-driven tools that bridge CX gaps across every touchpoint in the customer journey, we empower businesses to enhance engagement and achieve successful outcomes.”
These updates reaffirm 8×8’s position as a leading business communications, CX, and CPaaS platform provider. The 8×8 integrated cloud contact center and unified communications platform includes contact center, business phone, video meetings, team chat, and SMS capabilities in a single-vendor solution. The platform is built on a resilient, secure, and compliant platform, which offers the highest levels of reliability with financially backed, platform-wide 99.999% uptime SLA across an integrated cloud UCaaS and CCaaS solution.
8×8 customers can view the on-demand 8×8 webinar to learn more about the latest customer and employee experience enhancements.
Recently, 8×8 was named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service1. This is the thirteenth consecutive year 8×8 has been recognized as a Leader in this report. 8×8 was also recognized in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Contact Center as a Service2. This is the tenth consecutive year 8×8 has been recognized in this report.
[1] Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Pankil Sheth, Megan Fernandez, Christopher Trueman, Rafael Benitez, October 7, 2024. This Magic Quadrant report name has changed from 2015 onwards- 2015-2023: Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide, 2014: Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, North America With Additional Regional Presence, 2012-2013: Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, North America.
[2] Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Contact Center as a Service, Drew Kraus, Pri Rathnayake, Megan Fernandez, Pankil Sheth, Jason Bridge, October 28, 2024.
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