8x8 has announced the expanded availability of AI-powered voice support for 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant, adding to the already available digital capabilities and helping to drive increased customer adoption and usage.
8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant, a user-friendly conversational AI solution that provides organisations with virtual agents, enables businesses to create instant, effortless and engaging self-service experiences, now supports human-like voice as well as digital interactions across multiple regions and languages to deliver automation and personalised experiences at scale.
AI-powered voice self-service enables the automation of customer interactions to quickly resolve a wide range of use cases and issues, such as managing healthcare appointments, sales support and order management for retail purchases, paying utility and financial service bills, solving routine IT issues in professional services organisations and managing travel and hospitality reservations. The conversational and accurate support provided by voice support for 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant, enables organisations to improve operational efficiency while also increasing the rates of first contact resolution and customer satisfaction.
"Implementing 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant to handle easy, repetitive calls has greatly improved our operations, especially for our third-party team,” said Peter Hare, IT support technician at Activate Group. “Reducing the number of calls routed through to the team by 46 per cent by using the AI-powered technology has led to quicker responses as less time is spent waiting in a queue, and the repetitive questions can be answered by the bot, saving up to a minute per call. Ultimately this has boosted customer satisfaction.”
As 8x8 continues to enhance conversational AI capabilities, the number of customers using 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant to power self-service use cases has increased by more than 200 per cent year-over-year as of the quarter ending 30 June, 2024, resulting in the associated volume of digital and voice self-service interactions growing more than 200 per cent for the quarter on a year-over-year basis and more than one million interactions conducted on the platform to date.“
CX leaders recognise that intelligent virtual assistants can often resolve simple issues faster, while freeing up contact centre agents to manage more complex customer interactions. As consumers become more comfortable interacting with virtual assistants, businesses are increasingly confident deploying customer-facing AI-powered self-service technologies,” said Sheila McGee-Smith, founder and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics. “With 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant for both voice and digital, organizations can leverage a complete conversational AI solution while always ensuring that a human agent will be available, with full interaction context, to deliver an elevated level of customer experience at scale.”
In addition to offering fully intelligent virtual agent capabilities powering a wide range of simple and complex use cases, voice support for 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant can respond to intent and provide human-like responses. This allows the solution to quickly resolve a broad range of customer issues without the need for human intervention. As a result, processes that would normally require human intervention can be automated to reduce operational costs while providing instant 24/7 service.
“The implementation of 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant for Voice has saved £40,000 annually and improved our call handling success rate to over 80 per cent,” said Christie Jones, project lead at Oldham Council. “Our multi-skilled agents can now manage calls seamlessly alongside their other tasks, reducing idle time and improving overall operational efficiency. Next steps are to investigate which other contact center services can benefit from using conversational AI technology to improve efficiency and the customer experience.”