8×8 unveils a bevy of new customer-facing AI capabilities

This week 8×8 Inc. held a monetary and trade analyst occasion on the Nasdaq constructing in Occasions Sq., and with a venue like that, one would count on one thing massive. The corporate definitely delivered, going news-heavy immediately by loading up its product with several new artificial intelligence capabilities concentrating on buyer expertise enchancment.

The infusion of AI into CX platforms, comparable to contact facilities, has been a rising development as AI has matured and moved out of the labs. Bettering CX is a key initiative for nearly each enterprise chief I converse with immediately because it’s now the highest model differentiator. An attention-grabbing knowledge level from my analysis is that final 12 months, two-thirds of millennials modified loyalties to a model due to a single unhealthy expertise and that development will clearly proceed.

The problem for corporations immediately is that there are such a lot of channels and sources of information that even the best-trained brokers wrestle to supply nice service. Enter AI, which may increase individuals interactions and assist corporations provide self-service instruments however then give brokers extra well timed info as effectively.

On the occasion, 8×8 introduced updates to its eXperience Communications as a Service or XCaaS platform with new capabilities that leverage a number of superior applied sciences, together with AI, machine studying and pure language understanding.

The brand new capabilities embody 8×8 Clever Buyer Assistant and eight×8 Supervisor Workspace for 8×8 Contact Middle, along with a platform-wide integration with OpenAI LLC, maker of the chatbot phenom ChatGPT. Clever Buyer Assistant and Supervisor Workspace are geared toward bettering the client expertise and group productiveness, whereas the mixing with OpenAI provides extra highly effective AI capabilities to the platform.

Conversational AI may help organizations automate routine buyer interactions, present personalised suggestions and help brokers in resolving advanced points. This removes lots of the low-complexity repetitive calls from brokers, permitting them to give attention to tougher points.

8×8’s new conversational AI answer, Clever Buyer Assistant, comes with a number of key options that assist organizations obtain these advantages, together with a self-service function that makes use of pure language understanding and machine studying to deal with buyer requests by conversations. It helps greater than 100 languages, so organizations can construct dialog flows as soon as and apply them to any channel. It additionally comes with graphical scripting instruments for constructing and deploying chatbots throughout totally different channels.

Using AI has vastly improved self-service instruments comparable to chatbots. With out AI, a bot is nothing greater than a text-based interactive voice response the place clients would say one thing like “steadiness” as a substitute of hitting “1” on their telephone. If it doesn’t match precisely, the bot can’t reply. AI brings pure language understanding the place a buyer can discuss usually and the AI will interpret it and take the very best motion.

A typical problem for contact heart supervisors is having to handle a number of purposes, which will be time-consuming and overwhelming. With Supervisor Workspace, directors can view and handle their groups and data on a single display. The answer supplies supervisors with teaching and efficiency suggestions based mostly on AI insights. It additionally permits supervisors to create a number of workspaces based mostly on particular person wants and priorities, making it simpler to change roles and obligations. Supervisor Workspace has a user-friendly design with out-of-the-box role-based templates for sooner onboarding.

This function is vital to managing a distant contact heart. Traditionally, supervisors would handle brokers by strolling across the facility listening for audible queues as as to whether an agent is struggling, or a name goes awry. This may’t be finished when staff are at house as a result of supervisors can’t take heed to all calls in all areas – however machines can. The brand new world of labor requires new instruments to handle, and that’s what 8×8 has constructed with its Supervisor Workspace.

Each Clever Buyer Assistant and Supervisor Workspace have built-in analytics capabilities and so they seamlessly combine with buyer relationship administration methods and different enterprise purposes. One other key integration that 8×8 launched in XCaaS is with OpenAI, a number one generative AI engine supplier. It is a important improvement for organizations trying to leverage the ability of AI of their contact facilities.

AI-driven improvements, together with conversational AI, personalised workspaces for supervisors, and correct transcription and translation providers permit companies to ship constant experiences throughout all channels and meet their clients’ wants. Through the use of AI at massive scale, organizations can perceive and work together with their clients on a a lot deeper degree.

For 8×8, I imagine this marks a seminal second in its historical past, as a result of I’m anticipating it to guide extra with customer-facing versus employee-facing options. About 18 months in the past, 8×8 launched XCaaS, which is its go-to-market time period for built-in Unified Communications as a Service, or UCaaS, and Contact Middle as a Service, or CCaaS. The worth proposition of bringing the 2 collectively is that it allows staff to work together with clients and workers although a single pane of glass.

To this point, the 8×8 gross sales movement was to guide with UCaaS capabilities after which upsell CCaaS. That’s getting harder as a result of most UCaaS distributors are at or close to function parity with each other, making pricing the differentiator. In reality, one advertising and marketing govt from one other cloud communications firm described UCaaS as “one massive sea of sameness.” Though I don’t assume that is fully true, it’s definitely trending that approach. I imagine 8×8 is making the shift to having XCaaS be contact heart led after which will look to promote unified communications because the add-on, which ought to create extra stickiness inside its buyer base.

A number of years in the past, this wouldn’t have labored, since contact heart instruments had been used solely by contact heart brokers. However on this CX-driven world, companies are actually giving contact heart capabilities to different employee varieties comparable to advertising and marketing, buyer success, receptionists, subject service, inside gross sales, account managers and extra. This has created a a lot bigger addressable marketplace for contact heart platforms.

Additionally, although I imagine the typical promoting costs on UCaaS at greatest keep flat and certain decline, the infusion of AI into the contact heart will trigger the pricing to rise, as a result of there may be important buyer worth generated. I don’t need to downplay the significance of a wonderful worker expertise, however something that impacts clients typically will get a bigger share of pockets inside corporations.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Analysis, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this text for SiliconANGLE.

Picture: 8×8