What's new in May?

8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant is a powerful, user-friendly conversational AI solution that enables businesses to create simple to complex automated self-service experiences across channels. 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant makes it possible to build highly scalable, always available experiences across multiple regions and languages.

Key features include:

• Graphical, click & add scripting tools
• Built-in comprehensive analytics with performance recommendations
• Build bots once and apply flows across any channel
• Real-time translation in 100+ languages
• Turnkey integrations to CRMs & other systems

In response to customer feedback, this month we will release the ability to filter on favorite queues and agents in Agent Workspace. The enhanced filter will now show a new option to show only favorite queues or favorite agents allowing you to filter out less important items while viewing those that matter most to you.

Thanks to the feedback received from our customers about the need to see both agents and queues in a single view in 8x8 Agent Workspace. We are delighted to deliver this new feature that has had exceptional customer interest.

Accessible from a single click on the Dashboard icon in the Control Panel of the Agent Workspace, the new Agent Dashboard provides everything you need to see colleagues’ availability, and levels of demand in the contact center.

It’s possible to filter these views, and they’re actionable too, allowing supervisors to monitor queues; and all users to chat and call with other agents.

For more information, click here.

We will be introducing improvements to the look and feel of our web chat widgets which offer your customers a channel of communication. These improvements include:

• An increased size of the chat window and the introduction of a send button along with minor enhancements to other chat elements.

  

• Ability to integrate with our chat gateway so you can use conversation Artificial Intelligence vendors.

• Ability to keep session - When a customer using the web chat navigates to another page on the website, they are still able to continue that conversation with the agent.

Note: To access this new feature, admins must log into 8x8 Configuration Manager, create new web chat components, and apply them to the chat script.

We are introducing a new Chat Gateway, which is replacing Chat API v2. The Chat Gateway allows you to route your customer queries to be automated by a conversational AI vendor. This means that a vendor can use their own channels and route the query to an 8x8 agent.

This enhancement of the Chat API v2 allows the query to be routed to a 3rd party vendor, then handed off to an agent with context of the bot conversation using an 8x8 channel.

Other improvements include

• Send attachments to and from agents
• Send rich media to 8x8 web chat from the Gateway
• Improved authentication process from Chat API v2

For developer documentation, click here.

Following up on the support for email channel in Salesforce, we will be introducing this capability in Microsoft Dynamics integration. Agents using the 8x8 integration for Microsoft Dynamics will now able to create, accept, reply, and forward emails in 8x8 Contact Center app, passing the evidence of these emails to Microsoft Dynamics. When an email is offered, the 8x8 Contact Center app searches for the customer information in Microsoft Dynamics, and, if available in the system, pops the customer record for reference.

The extended support for email communication also allows supervisors to monitor agent productivity in 8x8 using 8x8 Analytics for Contact Center and Quality Management applications.

We are introducing a new feature to enhance our digital offering that will allow agents to send outbound SMS messages to customers. With this enhancement, agents can communicate with customers more effectively. For example, while on call with the customer, agents can send out an SMS message to confirm an order or reference a case. While working on an inbound case, an agent can send an SMS message asking the customer to contact via chat or phone.

Features

• Send a standalone SMS message as an interaction
• Send a message to a customer while on an interaction with the customer (phone call or chat)
• Select a channel number to send the message from and select the customer phone number to send the message to
• Send a canned message from the knowledge base or type a custom message
• Messages will be delivered to customers phone from the selected channel number
• Customer responses to messages will be routed via the SMS channel

8x8 Analytics for Contact Center is introducing the following enhancements in it's upcoming release later this month:

• Digital Channels report will be available to our customers in Canada ( this was released for the other regions with 2.8.0 release.)

• Reporting support for outbound SMS interactions will be covering the following possible scenarios:

  • Independent interaction - a new entry in the Interactions Detailed Report
  • An SMS sent while on an active call - a label attached to the phone interaction
• Emails reply reporting: In the Interactions Detailed report, a new label will be displayed for the email interaction once an agent replies to the customer.
• A new metric will be available in the Agent Interactions Summary: Processing Time which represents sum between the time spent by agent handling the interaction (Handling time) + Wrap Up time (This is available in Historical Reports which will be retired later this year.)
• Increased drop threshold for emails in queue from 30 days to 100 days: Customers will have the possibility of reporting on the emails that are waiting in queue for up to 100 days, compared to 30 days available now.

This release includes new features designed to enhance post interaction survey analysis by incorporating new digital channels for review while enabling 8x8 Quality Management and Speech Analytics (QM/SA) to work seamlessly with external CRMs such as Salesforce, MS Dynamics, etc.

These new features include:

• 8x8 Quality Management and Speech Analytics (QM/SA) is now available for all digital channels (email, webchat, social media direct messages). This enhancement advances QM/SA to a more comprehensive solution across all contact center communication channels.
• Access to digital channel attachments: All attachments within a digital interaction will now be accessible within QM/SA to ensure the quality evaluator has all the facts at hand without leaving the evaluation interface.
• Redirect to QM will work from external CRMs: This new feature adds a field to QM/SA, callID, that allows users to search external CRMs like Salesforce, MS Dynamics, etc. for specific interactions for evaluation. Users gain access to easier search and retrieval for interactions. This new feature is supported for our single and multi-tenant customers.

Additionally, we are planning to release the following enhancements.

Following feedback from customers, we are improving the user experience for those who wish to change from one sub-status to another. A sub-status also referred to as a status code indicates the reason for taking break or working offline state, such as “lunch break” or “in a meeting”. Currently, agents cannot change from one sub-status to another while working offline (e.g. from Coaching to Meeting while working offline), or while taking a break, without first switching to another status (e.g. Working offline: Coaching -> Available -> Working offline: Meeting). This causes inconvenience to customers and also impacts reports, which may show a number of short breaks. This may also result in agents being offered new interactions while switching status. This new update enables customers to move directly between sub-statuses without having to change the parent status—providing convenience and better productivity reports.

Let's say you are working offline to attend a meeting. Once you are done with the meeting, you want to continue to work offline, but now to prepare meeting notes. You can now switch the status code without switching your status.

As part of our ongoing commitment to improving our Contact Directory features, we have enhanced the filtering capabilities making finding your contact center and back-office colleagues even simpler and more convenient. In addition to the regular free text search box (1), you can also access additional filters by clicking the filters button (2) and filter the list by agent group, presence status, department, job title, and location. You can also select multiple filtering criteria simultaneously to identify colleagues quickly. Filters persist until cleared or until cookies are cleared from the cache.