Campbell-based cloud services provider 8×8 has announced it has integrated AI across its products, including OpenAI’s Whisper model, throughout its XCaaS (eXperience Communications as a Service) platform.
The company released a statement that its offerings: Intelligent Customer Assistant, Supervisor Workspace and 8×8 Contact Center, have also been integrated with AI/ML natural language tools.
To transform business, contact centre performance and enhance CX, 8×8 has stated it wants to “build exceptional customer journeys, enhance team productivity, and empower leaders with advanced real-time insights”.
Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer, 8×8, commented: “These AI-driven innovations to the 8×8 XCaaS platform provide our customers with the easily designable tools they need to meet them whenever and wherever to deliver the most consistent experience possible.”
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8×8 Platform Power Using AI
8×8 is a nine-time Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for UCaaS, and its XCaaS platform integrates contact centre, voice communications, video, chat, and SMS and looks to capitalise on having no silos between UCaaS and CCaaS with AI power.
Middleton added: “Whether it’s conversational AI and a highly effective self-service product, a highly composable, personalised contact centre experience for supervisors, or accurate and dynamic intelligence across the entire platform, 8×8 XCaaS delivers a modern platform to meet their present and future business requirements.”
The Chief Product Officer explained one of the main reasons behind the buzz and current rush to implement AI tools; he stated:
“Customers are turning to cloud-first environments because they offer fast, personalised solutions that allow them to operate in the way, and across the channels, that make the most sense for their business — there is no one size fits all in the enterprise.
Successful CX Requires Tech Investment According to Research
Along with the announcement, 8×8 supplied remarks from UC&C strategic research experts Metrigy, which has produced data confirming the positive outcomes for enterprises that integrate AI.
“Our research clearly shows that investing in AI, platform integration, and more efficient operational processes delivers results,” confirmed Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst at Metrigy. “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.”
Gareiss added that AI was crucial to CX and stated:
“Transforming into an AI-powered contact centre is no longer a luxury; it’s necessary for companies that want to deliver stellar customer experience and gain competitive advantage.”
8×8 AI Integrations in Practice
Intelligent Customer Assistant and Acer
A user-friendly solution, 8×8 Intelligent Customer Assistant enables enterprises to create simple, complex cross-channel self-service experiences.
As part of the 8×8 Contact Center, it provides graphical functionality that allows firms to establish highly scalable, available, and consistent experiences across multiple regions and languages. Companies can subsequently:
- Deliver intelligent self-service that takes care of customer requests with natural conversation
- Leverage graphical scripting tools for a single chatbot deployed to any channel
- Create contact flows for any channel in 100+ languages and gain actionable insights to optimise performance with integrated analysis
- Provide customer context and bot interaction details delivered to live agents to help eliminate blind redirects
- Leverage turnkey integrations with CRM systems and other enterprise apps, or connect to leading generative AI engines, such as OpenAI, accessible through an app ecosystem
Gary Boucher, Acer Program Manager, had previously tried AI but was frustrated. He said: “Taking advantage of AI-based technologies for self-service has shown great potential, but in practice has been frustrating to deploy and use.”
Boucher chose Intelligent Customer Assistant because of its robust features and ease of use. He explained:
“The overall simplicity belies its complexity on the back end. Additionally, it offers us the option to escalate to live assistance, when necessary, with a seamless handoff from the automated interaction to the contact centre agent.”
Self-Service Reimagined – Webinar
Focused on the launch of Intelligent Customer Assistant, 8×8 will broadcast a webinar entitled “Not Your Average Chatbot: Self-Service Reimagined” the webinar will be hosted by Sheila McGee-Smith, Founder and Principal Analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics, and Patrick Russell, Director of Product Management at 8×8.
The 30-minute broadcast will be shown on Wednesday, March 22 at 9am PT; 12pm ET; 5pm GMT. For interested viewers looking to discover more about how conversational AI and advancements are altering the future of self-service, they will need to register here.
Supervisor Workspace and Brent Council
A single interface solution, Supervisor Workspace combines analytics, performance management, and team administration, which comes in handy.
“An unexpected challenge of supervising a contact centre team is simply managing the multiple applications that are needed for task management, team overview, and metrics and analytics,” commented Rohena Sharma, Team Manager, Brent Council.
Sharma explained: “8×8 Supervisor Workspace removes that challenge, allowing me to view and manage the teams, and all related information, in a single screen. It’s amazing how much time is saved and how much more productive I can be when not switching between a dozen different applications!”
Focused on performance for contact centre leaders, key capabilities include:
- AI-propelled intelligence, support, and guidance provide managers with recommendations to improve remediation and drive contact centre performance
- Multiple workspaces to switch between roles and responsibilities for efficiency and flexibility
- User-friendly design and role-based templates to speed up onboarding
- Single view contact centre insights and operations, including seamless integration with third-party applications and integration with data from WFM, CRM and BI tools
XCaaS Platform and OpenAI Integration
8×8 plans to use OpenAI’s Whisper AI model and bring precision transcription, translation, and summarisation services to the 8×8 XCaaS platform. OpenAI has indeed been busy: the tech startup at the centre of the ChatGPT phenomenon recently offered an API for developers and cheaper ChatGPT for the enterprise.
The new Whisper integration, combined with 8×8 Quality Control and speech analytics for the contact centre and 8×8 Conversation IQ, is set to deliver an 85 percent transcription accuracy in the most popular languages, having more than 50 languages for both UCaaS and CCaaS support.
8×8 believes that the XCaaS and OpenAI integration across this platform will ultimately make it easier for companies to realise the potential of generative AI at scale and help with interacting with their customers and understanding them on a more personal level.
Nasdaq Closing Bell Honour for 8×8
To celebrate the launch of new “driven enhancements that transform business and contact centre performance,” Samuel Wilson, Interim CEO, 8×8 was invited by Nasdaq to ring the stock market’s closing bell, in a ceremony at the Nasdaq Marketsite Studio, and broadcast worldwide.
