Today, organisations are under more pressure than ever from customers to forge deeper connections. To meet that demand, contact centres have been undergoing a profound transformation, with the concept of a ‘contact centre’ yielding to the broader concept of ‘customer experience’ (CX). Contact centres are converting from featuring live agents to also including AI agents, from reactive to proactive, from transaction-oriented to relationship-oriented, and from generic to deeply personalised.
Given the importance of customer experience in the market and to help organisations make the transition to it, 8×8 undertook a fundamental pivot a few years ago, shifting from a company with communication and collaboration at its core to one with customer experience assuming its central identity. Symbolically, 8×8’s XCaaS platform – housing an integrated mix of unified communication, customer experience, and CPaaS capabilities – was renamed as the 8×8 Platform for CX.
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To help organisations navigate the transition from the contact centre world, 8×8 and rivals such as Cisco, RingCentral, and Zoom have been rolling out a steady stream of CX capabilities. Just during March and February alone, 8×8 has been very busy launching multiple CX enhancements that are intrinsic to its makeover.
A sample of more noteworthy features illustrates how aggressively 8×8 has been fortifying its CX capabilities. The 8×8 Platform for CX is a good starting point with several introductions falling under that umbrella. The integration of Salesforce Customer 360 into ‘8×8 Agent Workspace’ helps agents provide more personalised CX; ‘8×8 Workforce Management’, which helps supervisors with forecasting, scheduling, and shift management, is now available with every contact centre pricing package; the introduction of ‘8×8 Smart Assist’ offers agents GenAI-driven capabilities such as real-time guidance, dynamic workflows, and intelligent automation. Outside ‘8×8 Platform for CX’, ‘8×8 Engage’, which brings customer experience functionality to mobile workers, is now available to all channel partners and customers globally.
An important aspect underpinning the announcements is that, in addition to delivering customer experience tools to contact centre agents, 8×8 is making them accessible to customer-impacting groups beyond service departments, such as frontline teams. Vendors, including 8×8, are increasingly acknowledging that in theory, the mission of any organisation is to serve its customers and therefore every employee has responsibility for customer satisfaction, whether directly customer-facing or not. In catering to workers both inside and outside the contact centre, 8×8 is keeping pace with rivals while also expanding the universe to which it can sell its CX tools.
Counteracting the momentum 8×8 is creating for itself is the marketing of its CX portfolio. Offering a menu of modules provides customers with flexibility in crafting a CX footprint tailored to their needs. However, the confusion created by such a piecemeal approach outweighs that benefit. What each component does and where one leaves off, and another picks up, is not clear without conducting a fair bit of investigation. Customers would be better served by 8×8 taking a more muted approach and proffering a slightly narrower number of individual components while preserving the same breadth of functionality.
