In a significant move, 8×8 has concurrently announced a series of new or expanded products for its customer engagement solutions.
“We are a company that prides itself on putting our customers, and their customers, first and foremost, which becomes incredibly apparent when considering the technology and areas where we are innovating,”
Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, said.
This launch features four major solutions, targeting key pain points in the CX journey, from channel fragmentation and communication silos to limited visibility into customer interactions and inefficient AI implementation.
The four major solutions announced are 8×8 Engage, 8×8 JourneyIQ, RCS Business Messaging support for 8×8 Contact Center, and 8×8 AI Orchestrator.
Each addresses specific aspects of the customer experience challenge, from expanding digital channel support to enhancing journey visibility, enabling rich messaging experiences, and optimizing AI implementation.
8×8 Engage: Expanding Omnichannel Capabilities
8×8 Engage represents an expansion of 8×8’s digital channel capabilities, now enabling employees outside the traditional contact center to engage with customers across multiple communication channels.
With 8×8 Engage, organizations can now provide seamless support across voice, video, SMS, Viber, WhatsApp, email, and RCS Business Messaging—giving customers control over how they connect.
This channel flexibility allows for transitions between different communication methods, such as elevating a voice call to a one-way video stream for troubleshooting, without disrupting the continuity of the interaction.
The solution provides a unified customer view, equipping all customer-facing employees with complete, real-time visibility into each customer’s history, preferences, and sentiment.
This comprehensive perspective enables more proactive and personalized experiences, regardless of whether staff are in the office or on the move.
8×8 JourneyIQ: Tracking the Customer Journey
8×8 JourneyIQ introduces a new capability for businesses to track, predict, and optimize each step of the customer journey across all channels, departments, and touchpoints.
This solution addresses the persistent challenge in customer experience management of maintaining a complete view of customer interactions as they move between different parts of an organization.
Powered by the 8×8 Customer Interaction Data Initiative, JourneyIQ delivers real-time, AI-powered intelligence that eliminates blind spots and identifies points of friction in the customer journey.
By unifying customer interaction data across UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS APIs, it provides a 360-degree view of customers and their journey.
The solution maps touchpoints like agent handoffs, back-office involvement, and resolution paths to give visibility across the organization.
JourneyIQ leverages advanced AI for real-time decision-making, identifying customer friction points and enabling proactive measures before CX metrics are negatively impacted.
It supports intelligent orchestration by identifying end-to-end opportunities and delivering insights that help eliminate unnecessary escalations and handoffs.
Additionally, the solution enables smart workflow optimization through continuous, AI-driven insights that help fine-tune staffing, coaching, and processes in real-time, reducing manual effort and optimizing resource allocation.
RCS Support for 8×8 Contact Center
8×8’s introduction of Rich Communication Services (RCS) support for its Contact Center platform represents an update in messaging capabilities.
This update allows organizations to leverage two-way omnichannel engagement and deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences through this new and growing messaging service.
The announcement includes new RCS Business Messaging (RBM) services to help organizations tap into more engaging RCS messaging for branded, secure customer interactions.
Key features of the RCS support include closed-loop two-way communication, enabling businesses to create more engaging and personalized messaging via seamless connections between customers and contact center specialists or AI-powered bots.
Organizations can provide customers with dynamic content through shared texts, images, videos, carousels, and calls-to-action for an enhanced experience.
The solution also offers real-time analytics and insights into message performance, enabling businesses to optimize their communication strategies based on delivery, open, and click-through rates.
Real-time updates and feedback capabilities allow organizations to keep customers informed and gather feedback directly through embedded surveys or response buttons.
8×8 AI Orchestrator: Optimizing Multi-Vendor AI
The 8×8 AI Orchestrator aims to address the issue of silos for organizations implementing AI.
Traditionally, organizations using multiple AI bots from different vendors faced significant challenges in creating coherent customer experiences, as these systems operated in silos without the ability to interact with each other.
The 8×8 AI Orchestrator aims to address this problem by enabling organizations to create conversation workflows across different AI bots, offering seamless experiences that meet customer needs regardless of which system they’re interacting with.
The solution provides AI flexibility, allowing organizations to deploy specific AI-powered bots required to maximize operational efficiencies and support business growth without worrying about orchestration and management challenges.
The AI Orchestrator also enables customers to adopt AI solutions quickly across multiple vendors, adapting to the evolving needs and requirements of their organization.
Like all the newly announced solutions, the AI Orchestrator is built on the 8×8 Platform for CX, which unites contact center, UC, and communication APIs to help organizations connect customers and teams globally.
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