8×8 Makes It Easier for Organizations to Engage, Work, and Manage Interactions Between Employees and Customers

Winter 2021 Release Delivers New Customer Engagement and Cloud Communications Enhancements Across Integrated Platform

8×8, Inc., a leading integrated cloud communications platform provider, 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 8×8 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.

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Easy to Engage

8×8’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 8×8 Contact Center and Microsoft Teams – 8×8 Contact Center is now included in Microsoft’s Connected Contact Center for Microsoft Teams Certification program, integrating seamlessly with 8×8 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 8×8 webinar.
• Drive customer engagement and sales success – Customers can now utilize 8×8 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 8×8 Speech Analytics, 8×8 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 8×8 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 – 8×8 and Verint recently announced a partnership, bringing additional cloud workforce management applications integrated with 8×8 Contact Center. Tight synchronization of historical and real-time interaction data and agent information from 8×8 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 8×8 business customers through the 8×8 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 8×8 Chat Apps API now allows companies to reach customers across seven different services, including WhatsApp, Viber, and Facebook Messenger.

“We’ve seen tremendous results in using the 8×8 Auto Dialer,” said Dominic McDonald, Managing Director, italk telecom. “Increased agent productivity, simplified management, and overall improved visibility into our campaigns has made a significant impact in how we proactively connect with our customers. The user experiences for admins and agents alike is so simple that proactive outreach is an effortless part of our daily operations.”

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Easy to Work

The 8×8 Work app, which includes voice, video meetings and team chat, allows users to connect and collaborate securely with customers and colleagues from anywhere, using any device. New enhancements make it easier to:

• Manage settings directly from Microsoft Teams – With 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams, users can simply log into their Microsoft Teams app to view and update 8×8 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 8×8’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.

Easy to Manage

The integrated 8×8 cloud communications and contact center platform allows organizations with distributed offices and workforce to reduce total cost of ownership, providing a single vendor for support and a central management portal for administration. Winter 2021 Release enhancements include:

• Support for compliance initiatives – 8×8 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.

“The 8×8 single-vendor cloud platform was purpose-built to eliminate silos, facilitate dynamic collaboration and engage both customers and employees through highly personalized experiences,” said Dejan Deklich, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, Inc. “Our global cloud approach enables us to rapidly inject new, innovative capabilities into our integrated contact center, voice communications, chat, meetings, and APIs product. We are proud to support organizations’ digital transformation efforts with a platform that delivers everything they need to meet unique business requirements, and thrive in the new operate-from-anywhere model.”

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