8×8 Help Teams Start Every Customer Conversation With Context

8×8 has announced a series of updates to its 8×8 Platform for CX, introducing new capabilities designed to give contact centre agents greater visibility of customer interactions and improve continuity across communication channels.

The updates include a new Customer 360 view, expanded AI agent deployment options, improved Salesforce integration and additional messaging capabilities.

A central focus of the release is helping human and AI agents access information from previous conversations, reducing the need for customers to repeat themselves when switching channels or speaking to different agents.

Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8×8, commented:

“Customers expect whoever picks up, including an AI agent, to already know what came before.

“These updates make that the default, so when a customer reaches someone, the history is already in front of them. Customers now expect that continuity from every interaction.”

One of the main additions is Customer 360 within 8×8 Agent Workspace, which provides agents with a consolidated view of a customer’s interaction history.

The feature draws on contextual information collected across the platform, allowing agents to review previous conversations without switching between multiple applications.

Where speech analytics is enabled, the workspace can also display AI-generated sentiment and topic insights, providing additional information about previous interactions.

The aim is to help agents understand the background to an enquiry more quickly and reduce the time spent searching for customer information.

8×8 has also expanded its AI Studio capabilities, allowing businesses to build an AI agent once and deploy it across several communication channels.

These include voice, SMS, WhatsApp, 8×8 Work and web-based interactions, without having to rebuild the agent for each channel.

AI agents can also support human agents by suggesting answers and recording interaction notes in real time.

The update is intended to make it easier for organisations to maintain consistent AI functionality across channels while retaining information from previous customer conversations.

The release also introduces updates to 8×8 JourneyIQ to bring together voice interaction data from 8×8 Engage, 8×8 Work, 8×8 Contact Center and 8×8 AI Studio.

A visual journey map allows teams to track call transfers and identify where interactions may have stalled or ended unexpectedly.

Alongside this, 8×8 has introduced a Salesforce Chrome Extension designed to maintain key CRM workflows as Salesforce phases out Open CTI.

Two further updates focus on outbound communications and customer identification.

The new Call as Company feature allows 8×8 Engage users to display their organisation’s telephone number rather than an individual work number when making outbound calls. Administrators can control which number is displayed.

Meanwhile, 8×8 has introduced RCS Business Messaging in Singapore through Singtel.

The capability allows businesses to send verified messages containing images, videos, carousels and interactive buttons, with configurable SMS fallback for devices that do not support RCS.

Together, the updates extend 8×8’s existing customer interaction and communication capabilities, with a particular emphasis on making customer history accessible across human-assisted and automated conversations.

Author: Alice Cuerden