What's new in the 8x8 Contact Center 9.4 release?

In this release, 8x8 8x8 Contact Center introduces new features, enhancements, and bug fixes to improve the overall productivity administrators, agents, and supervisors in your contact center.

Audience

This release guide is intended for 8x8 Contact Center customers migrating from 8.4 release platform. The guide summarizes the features and improvements introduced in release 9.4.

Features

Introducing Global Reach for 8x8 Contact Center.
The Single-Tenant Global Reach initiative from 8x8 Contact Center provides best call quality on VoIP across continents.
Offers significant improvements in IVR capabilities and caller experience.

Access Global Reach for 8x8 Contact Center

For details about how to access Global Reach and its use cases, refer to our content in 9.0 release. Apart from the Global Reach, the release offers significant improvements in IVR capabilities thus improving caller experience. The following list of features and enhancements are categorized based on the audience.

General

Localization: We support European French and German languages.
Browser Support: We support Microsoft Edge browser.

For Administrators

In-Queue Treatments and Controls: Ability to provide better in queue experience to callers.
Queued Callback: Ability to call back customers who opted out of waiting in the queue.
Text to Speech: Ability to announce free text or dynamically collected data using the text to speech engine.
Agent Menu: Enhanced experience for callers in direct agent routed calls.
Time Zone Enhancements: Support for multiple time zones to better handle global operation of the contact center.
IVR In-Queue Improvements: Improves caller's experience while waiting to be served in a queue.
More IVR Improvements: New IVR objects are added.
Support for Softphone: Extended support for Bria.
Co-browsing via Chat: Ability to initiate Co-browsing via chat sessions.
Improvements in Local CRM: The Local CRM now gives the ability to mark fields as mandatory, customize the display order of these fields and even hide them.
Optimized Call Quality and Routing: We now allow agents to input their country of location that helps optimize call quality and routing.

For Agents

Co-browsing via Chat: Ability to initiate via chat sessions.
Improved help interface: Agents and supervisors can now submit feedback about the product, refer to the product help, and more.
Optimized Call Quality and Routing: We now allow agents to input their country of location that helps optimize call quality and routing.
Agent-to-Agent/Extension dialing: The new and improved methods of agent-to-agent/extension dialing are now implemented in this release. This is applicable to users with 8x8 Unified Login and Unified Login with 8x8 Work. For details, refer to the respective agent guides.
- Dialing the extension number from the shared directory and from the telephone field in the Control Panel are now supported. The call is routed to the dialed agent and treated based on the PBX script assigned to the agent.
- Incoming calls for agent PBX number and DID number get routed based on the PBX number script and DID scripts. If you have specified separate treatments for customer-to-agent dialing and agent-to-agent dialing, the respective scripts get activated.

For Supervisors

Agent Whisper: We have now introduced the ability for contact center supervisors to barge in to active calls between agents and customers, listen in, coach or train agents live with Whisper feature.
Automatic Monitoring: The silent monitoring feature allows a supervisor to eavesdrop on a conversation between an agent and a customer without either party knowing that they are being monitored.
Enhanced usability of Real-Time Monitoring: Supervisors can now access the monitoring tool from an easy-to-access monitoring tab along with other Local CRM tabs.
Improved Monitoring: The monitoring data is updated even when the supervisor is on Break status. The last monitoring configuration before the supervisor logs out is saved and presented when they log back in.

For Developers

API web callback: Agents can now cancel a callback request that has already entered the queue. If agents dial out and interact with customers, whose web callback requests are still pending in the queue, agents may prefer to cancel the pending requests. Interactions created by the web callback API can be easily removed by requesting the delete web callback API. For details, refer to Web Callback API.