8x8 Unveils New Features for its Contact Center Platform

The old adage that says “a business is only as good as its people” is important to remember, especially for organizations running contact centers. Highly skilled, knowledgeable, and motivated contact center agents will definitely help a company succeed, especially given that the customer experience has become a key differentiator in today's competitive market. For agents to remain engaged in their work and, in turn, engage customers with their product and/or brand, agents need more than recognition for their achievements and a general understanding of how their work contributes to the success of the company. They also need access to the right technology and tools that will enable them to understand customers better and encourage collaboration with their colleagues and supervisors in order to create top-notch customer service.
8x8, the world’s first Communications Cloud provider, recognizes the importance of empowering contact center agents. To further help agents, they recently unveiled new enhancements to the 8x8 Virtual Contact Center® (VCC) platform geared towards improving contact center productivity, collaboration, and customer engagement. In this article, Tim Richter, Director of Product Marketing for 8x8's Virtual Contact Center, talks with VoipReview.org about the enhanced capabilities of their platform and shares how these new features can help address the challenges faced by modern contact centers.
Enhanced Contact Center Platform
Announced last week, 8x8 VCC’s new capabilities include Customer Experience Analytics and Post Call Survey. The introduction of the new features highlights the provider’s commitment to helping contact centers effectively address major business needs and challenges.
“An ongoing challenge for contact centers is effectively engaging agents to optimize performance and mitigate attrition,” said Richter. “Methods used in the past must evolve to address an increasingly millennial workforce. Making the contact center more millennial friendly requires creating a more hands-on, collaborative approach to work, keeping them engaged, and aligning their goals with the goals of the company.” And 8x8 VCC’s latest capabilities, no doubt, help organizations work towards creating a highly-engaged workforce and, consequently, an outstanding customer experience.
“The new features we announced for the 8x8 VCC platform will help supervisors and agents gather more insights from their customer interactions and improve the overall customer experience,” shared Richter.
What’s New in 8x8 Virtual Contact Center
Now available in the U.S. and U.K, 8x8 VCC platform now boasts the following features and capabilities:
Customer Experience Analytics - A ground-breaking analytical tool that provides agents and supervisors unprecedented levels of visibility into customer interactions and IVR usage.
Advanced search - According to Richter: “The advanced search capabilities enable contact center teams to search for specific types of customer interactions and learn from those interactions. Users can also search for calls that were blind transferred or where the agent put the customer on hold two or three times.” Having the ability to pin down those exact instances can help contact center employees fine tune their customer experience approaches.
- Graphical view of the customer journey - “With a few clicks, managers and supervisors can view intuitive graphical flows of the call and IVR (Interactive Voice Response) paths to find the answers quickly and efficiently,” shared Richter.
- IVR metrics - Detailed IVR metrics help teams highlight the most dominant IVR paths and abandonment rates, which are useful in improving the IVR design.
Post-Call Survey - 8x8’s native post-call survey application allows contact centers to truly understand and listen to the voice of the customer. “The post-call survey capability adds another layer to achieving a complete 360-view of a customer experience," explained Richter. "The survey adds more to the quality perception process and strengthens overall performance management.”
Flexible tool - Post-call surveys can be offered automatically via IVR; directly by agents; or independently as a stand-alone survey.
- Survey question in various formats - Survey questions can be offered in various formats, including Yes/No, Scale, and Voice Comment.
- Metrics categories - The post-call survey application enables teams to collect feedback from customers on topics such as customer satisfaction, agent performance, first call resolution, and net promoter score.
- Graphical reporting - Survey results can be presented and analyzed using customizable charts and graphs. This helps organizations easily translate data into actionable intelligence.
Richter advises that businesses start using these features right away to save time and provide better service throughout the contact center. “These tools enable supervisors to train agents more holistically and respond to upper-management with more data and insights into what is happening within the contact center as well as how customers interact with the company,” he explained.
8x8 Quality Management
In addition to introducing the Customer Experience Analytics and Post Call Survey features, 8x8 also launched the latest version of the 8x8 Quality Management™ solution. 8x8 Quality Management Version 3.5 delivers next-generation collaborative performance management. Richter believes that since contact centers are responsible for managing and maintaining some of the most important relationships in a company--customers and prospective clients--it’s important that quality is top of mind. “By increasing collaboration and views into what team members are doing, both good and bad, contact centers can improve their overall performance,” Richter said.
“Additionally, the millennial generation values self-improvement and personal growth. They tend to crave feedback on their performance. With quality management, supervisors can provide millennial agents with regular communications and coaching to not only improve their individual performance as customer service agents but also help align them with corporate goals to drive the overall success of the team’s operations and customer support,” added Richter.
New 8x8 Quality Management features include:
- Intuitive next generation collaboration via @mentions from almost anywhere within the solution. "This process looks and feels like tagging in social media and collaborating within a Google Doc, allowing users to work together quickly and effectively. Supervisors and agents alike can collaborate from within evaluations, call timelines or even from reports,” explained Richter.
- Scorecards with trending for consistent objective performance measurement - This allows quicker onboarding and improved agent productivity and satisfaction.
- An enhanced ‘slide-out’ user interface - This feature helps increase performance and customization of interaction data.
- Built-in help menus - This feature enables self-guided setup and use.
Customer Experience Analytics and Post Call Survey features are now available on 8x8 Virtual Contact Center Standard, Pro, and Ultimate service plans. Meanwhile, 8x8 Quality Management 3.5 is offered as part of the 8x8 Virtual Contact Center Ultimate service plan.
For additional information on 8x8’s newest features or to explore their contact center portfolio, please visit 8x8’s website.
About 8x8
8x8, Inc. (NASDAQ:EGHT) is the world’s first Communications Cloud provider, offering unified communications, team collaboration, contact center, and analytics solutions in a single, open and real-time platform. Based in San Jose, California, 8x8 is committed to providing high-powered communications and collaboration solutions that create a real and lasting impact to enterprises worldwide. 8x8 is trusted by more than 50,000 companies worldwide.