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8x8 Makes It Easier for Organizations to Engage, Work, and Manage Interactions Between Employees and Customers
29 Jan, 2021
Winter 2021 Release Delivers New Customer Engagement and Cloud Communications Enhancements Across Integrated Platform
CAMPBELL, CA - - 8x8, Inc. (NYSE:EGHT), a leading integrated cloud communications platform provider, today announced new contact center, voice communications, chat, meetings and Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) product enhancements to optimize employee and customer engagement. The latest 8x8 updates highlight the benefits organizations gain by having an integrated contact center and communications solution from a single provider, making it easy to engage, work, and manage interactions between employees and customers. Easy to Engage 8x8’s innovative customer engagement products help organizations exceed customer experience and growth objectives. According to Metrigy Research, companies integrating cloud communications and contact center with a single provider saw substantial benefits when compared to those using multiple providers. Using a single provider, companies reported increases in customer ratings (37 percent vs. 29 percent) and a dramatic rise in revenue (54 percent vs. 26 percent) versus their multiple-vendor counterparts. The Winter 2021 Release adds new features and functionality, key partnerships and integrations that offer customers the ability to:- Make and receive calls with 8x8 Contact Center and Microsoft Teams - 8x8 Contact Center is now included in Microsoft's Connected Contact Center for Microsoft Teams Certification program, integrating seamlessly with 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams direct routing capabilities. Contact center agents, knowledge workers and supervisors can make and receive PSTN calls using the native Microsoft Teams app as the preferred endpoint. Learn more about the Top Microsoft Teams Trends in 2021 in the upcoming 8x8 webinar.
- Drive customer engagement and sales success - Customers can now utilize 8x8 Quality Management for both inbound and outbound voice. The closed-loop workflow now includes automated notification, acknowledgement, feedback and reporting for more effective coaching. Combined with 8x8 Speech Analytics, 8x8 customers can easily mine, gather and share specific contextual examples of interactions with teams and individuals to improve NPS/CSAT, upsell, cross-sell and objection-handling training without exhaustive manual processing.
- Improve overall effectiveness of outbound campaigns - Enhancements to 8x8 Auto Dialer, like expanded monitoring statistics, help customers more effectively monitor, adjust and optimize campaign performance. To maximize call connection rates, expanded Sequential Dialing functionality now supports up to 22 numbers, making it easier to identify, select, and establish the order in which phone numbers will be contacted. High-volume and blended inbound/outbound sales teams can save time and experience greater productivity with enhanced support of auto-retry for abandoned and non-answered calls, busy tones, and answering machine detection.
- Expand workforce management functionality with Verint Monet and Verint Enterprise - 8x8 and Verint recently announced a partnership, bringing additional cloud workforce management applications integrated with 8x8 Contact Center. Tight synchronization of historical and real-time interaction data and agent information from 8x8 Contact Center with Verint Monet or Verint Enterprise is out of the box without the need for professional services, allowing mid-market and enterprise businesses to optimize customer engagement operations by making it even easier to plan, forecast, and schedule contact center agent workloads.
- Build customer trust - With Google Verified SMS, which is now available to 8x8 business customers through the 8x8 SMS API.
- Expand global customer reach - With the addition of KakaoTalk, a mobile messaging app with over 52 million monthly active users in South Korea. The 8x8 Chat Apps API now allows companies to reach customers across seven different services, including WhatsApp, Viber, and Facebook Messenger.
- Manage settings directly from Microsoft Teams - With 8x8 Voice for Microsoft Teams, users can simply log into their Microsoft Teams app to view and update 8x8 calling configurations, including voicemail and call forwarding, as well as log in and out of call queues.
- Decide who runs video meetings - Advanced moderator settings allow meeting owners and administrators to designate a single moderator and elevate other participants to the moderator role at any time during the meeting.
- Ensure the highest level of meeting security - In addition to 8x8’s unparalleled standards-based end-to-end encryption, moderators can lock the meeting once it is underway, requiring new participants to request access in a lobby before joining.
- Message multimedia files for faster collaboration - Provides richer, more personalized and efficient media exchange with MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) support for multimedia attachments in external communications.
- Stay connected without interruption - The Flip Call banner allows users to immediately change devices without any loss of connection, while quick-reply messages allow users to decline incoming calls but stay engaged with colleagues, partners and customers.
- Support for compliance initiatives - 8x8 Nomadic E911 helps customers meet US regulations set forth by Kari’s Law and RAY BAUM’s Act by providing company notifications of emergency calls and accurate, dynamic user location information for emergency callers.
- Ability to customize cost centers - Supports payment methods and expense allocation allowing IT to chargeback service costs through the easy set up of independent and site-based cost centers using company locations, sites, and teams.
