What's new in October 2024?

We are excited to announce the general availability (GA) of voice capabilities in our Intelligent Customer Assistant (ICA) platform. ICA is a powerful, user-friendly conversational AI solution that enables businesses to create instant, effortless, and engaging customer self-service experiences across all customer contact channels in multiple languages. To learn more, see our 2023 release, 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant.

We’ve implemented key improvements to our callback system based on customer feedback. Our new fairness mechanism prioritizes callbacks based on the customer’s position in the queue, ensuring a more equitable and efficient experience. Additionally, we’ve removed duplicated callback requests to avoid confusion and streamline operations, allowing only one callback per customer, per queue. This means your customers will experience fewer delays and a smoother interaction with your service. Learn more about callback improvements.

• Interested in getting early beta access to exciting new features? Want to help shape our future products and features? Please join our Customer Labs program to engage with our user experience research and product management teams. Visit our Customer Labs page to find additional details and enroll.
• Product End-of-Life: Customer Experience

  • We recommend you begin the transition towards Analytics for Contact Center as soon as possible. Customer Experience Analytics no longer displays data generated for several core features (i.e. Recent Calls metrics, Visual Customer Journey, IVR Report with the Dominant Paths, Digital Channels) since the production release of 8x8 Analytics for Contact Center version 2.10, which was completed on the 20th of June 2024.

  • Historical data will continue to be available in Customer Experience Analytics, including Post-Call Survey Analytics data. Please refer to the FAQ, the migration guide and the What’s new documentation for more details on the transition.
• Check our Network Best Practices for any updates as well as our Network Devices for updates on your applicable firewalls/devices.

Supervisor Mobile is available in Beta featuring:

• Access to the mobile workspace from the 8x8 Work for Mobile app for all X Series supervisor users with a VO license enabled
• A subset of widgets to track key performance indicators of supervised queues
• The ability to manage agents and queues from the mobile app
• Support for filtering by agent, agent group, queue and media type

8x8 Agent Workspace introduces the following enhancements in July:

• Integrated softphone: The embedded softphone allows agents to answer and place calls from 8x8 Agent Workspace, providing streamlined communication and eliminating the need to switch between applications. Agents can handle repetitive tasks more efficiently and enhance productivity. To learn more, see About 8x8 Agent Workspace softphone.
  
• Auto-attendants in contact directory: Adding auto-attendant contacts into the contact directory and transfer view (based on these contacts settings in the 8x8 Admin Console) eliminates the need for manual searches and inputs. This streamlined process reduces delays and errors, ensuring accurate and swift call handling for improved overall performance.
• Contact directory on transfer: Enhance the efficiency of agents by providing easy access to all contacts directly in the transfer view. It eliminates the need for manual searches and inputs, thereby reducing delays and errors, while ensuring accurate and swift call handling. By default, only agents and queues are displayed while all other contact types need to be checked from filters for these to appear in the view.

We have introduced support for the End-of-Life (EOL) initiative of Customer Experience Analytics Solution. With our latest release for 8x8 Analytics for Contact Center, we’re excited to share that core features i.e. call flow and IVR journey, repeated interactions, dominant script paths, and digital channels reports from Customer Experience Analytics are now available in 8x8 Analytics for Contact Center. To learn more, see What's new in 8x8 Analytics for Contact Center 2.10 release.

8x8 Agent Workspace has introduced the following enhancements recently:

• Add queues to favorites: When on transfer view and hovering over a queue, the favorite icon (star icon) will appear, allowing agents to add or remove a queue from favorites effortlessly to ensure quick and easy access to the preferred queues.
• MAQ metric update: On My assigned queues (MAQ), the agents' icon metric now shows Enabled and logged-in agents in a specific queue, instead of just enabled agents, for clearer visibility on a queue state.
  
• Chat with MS Teams users: Agents can seamlessly seek guidance to resolve complex issues and handle exceptional scenarios more effectively by initiating a chat with colleagues in Microsoft Teams directly from 8x8 Agent Workspace. For more details on enabling the functionality in Beta, please contact your Account Manager.
  

To learn more, see What's new for 8x8 Contact Center agents.

8x8 Supervisor Workspace has introduced the following enhancements recently:

• AI summarization in the Interaction Retrieval Widget for Contact Center interactions
  • The AI summarization feature, now in Pilot, offers concise summaries of agent-customer interactions, enriched with sentiment analysis, key topics, and interaction metrics.
  • The Interaction summary can be accessed via the View Summary button in the widget interaction list or from the Full Details page, providing valuable insights for supervisors to enhance operational performance.
    
  • If you have a Speech Analytics license and want to join the Pilot program, please contact us at [email protected] and our team will share additional details. Please note that spaces are limited, but we will try to include as many participants as possible.
• Additional metrics are available for Agents and Queues tables inside the Edit columns section. To learn more, see Configure agents table and Configure queues table.
  
• Supervisors can resize the Agents and Queues tables, enabling better visibility of agent and queue metrics in the workspace. Having the two tables side by side is now possible. To learn more, see Resize agents and queues tables.
  
  

We are increasing the character limit in the Text to Play from 210 to 1250, allowing for longer, seamless phrases in a single entry.

To further enhance usability, we’re enlarging the text box and adding a character counter, making it easier to manage your inputs. To learn more, What's new for admins in 8x8 Contact Center.

By adding a new Supervisor Workspace page, users will see the two tables (Agents and Queues) side-by-side, instead of stacked. This will improve the number of rows visible, to provide more info at a glance.

Resizing the tables will be possible when entering Edit widgets mode and clicking the bottom right corner of the tables.

8x8 Supervisor Workspace has introduced the following enhancements recently:

• The agent status code which indicates the reason for change of status (For example attend meeting, lunch break, attend training) is now available as a new column inside the Agents table in the dashboard.
  
• Ability to change agent status to Working offline or Break is now available with an additional step to also select the status code for that agent.
  

Additionally, we plan to introduce the following feature enhancement to our beta users in the near future:

• The Agent status mini-widget will soon be launched with an updated design to accommodate the wrap-up status (purple color) and status code overview in the tool tip.

8x8 Agent Workspace has introduced the following enhancements recently:

• We have elevated the usability of My Assigned Queues, with a primary focus on enhancing transparency and utility, empowering agents with an intuitive and efficient view that facilitates quicker decision-making during interactions. See improvements to my assigned queues.
  
  
• We have introduced an improved experience for transferring to both queues and individual contacts to streamline workflows and empower agents to manage their interactions efficiently. Learn more.
  
• New modern sound notification options for incoming calls to suit everyone’s taste and needs mirroring the modern library from the 8x8 Work app will be available soon in 8x8 Agent Workspace.

The 8x8 integration for Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics now supports interactions via SMS and WhatsApp channels. With this new feature, agents can send and receive SMS and WhatsApp messages to/from customers using the chat interface in the 8x8 Contact Center app. Customers using the 8x8 Contact Center Integration can now utilize the core features of the integration including screen pop and call log creation with SMS and WhatsApp digital channels.

Features:

• Ability to initiate an SMS message from Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics using the 8x8 integration
• Ability to view the customer contextual information when handling SMS & WhatsApp interactions
• Automatic creation of a detailed Interaction log once an SMS or WhatsApp interaction is completed

For details, refer to:

• What's new in the 8x8 Contact Center integration for Salesforce
• What's new in the 8x8 Contact Center integration for Microsoft Dynamics

Released earlier this month, this new enhancement allows 8x8 Contact Center agents to handle emails from the Control Panel in 8x8 Agent Workspace. This new capability allows agents to:

• View the sender’s email address in the same panel.
• Handle emails and view the thread in same panel.
• See attachments easily and the email they are associated with.
• Have their productivity reported in Analytics.

For details, see how to process email interactions using the Control Panel.

Note: We will continue to support the previous experience of handling emails via the Display panel.

We are planning to release the following enhancements in 8x8 Supervisor Workspace soon:

• 8x8 Supervisor Workspace will display only those queues assigned in Configuration Manager as supervised. This will fix filtering performance issues and aligns Supervisor Workspace with Configuration Manager settings.
• New status code column will be added to the Agents table in Supervisor Workspace
• Supervisors will be able to change agent status to “Working offline” and “On-break” with the possibility to select also the agent status code (sub-status)
• Agents and Queues tables will now behave as mini-widgets with the ability to remove one or both from the page, place them at the top of page.
• The Interaction Retrieval widget will introduce playback functionality for audio and video interactions.

Customers currently using 8x8 Speech Analytics have the option to participate in our early beta stages of testing AI summarization. This new feature will automatically extract key insights from a conversation and automatically upload the summary to the CRM.