8×8 Intros Agent Workspace, Aims to Transform Contact Center Experience

8×8 has unveiled its 8×8 Agent Workspace, which it says will transform the contact center agent role. Available through the channel, 8×8 Agent Workspace is a fully browser-based, design-led user interface (UI). The company says it delivers a tailored and intuitive experience, blending contact center and unified communications capabilities in a single application.

TalkingPointz’s Dave Michels

Dave Michels is principal analyst and founder of TalkingPointz.

“The pace of innovation in the customer experience sector is staggering. The need to stay on top of shifting customer demands requires [customer experience] leaders to deploy solutions that are adaptable and flexible,” Michels said. “8×8 Agent Workspace simplifies integrations and offers increased scalability. The web-based UI eliminates desktop software upgrades and supports distributed and hybrid office deployments. 8×8 clearly understands empowered agents have increased retention and customer satisfaction metrics.”

Work from Anywhere

Many contact center solutions fail to connect all interaction types; however, 8×8 Agent Workspace aims to support the changing requirements of today’s contact center agents. A core component of 8×8 Contact Center, 8×8 Agent Workspace leverages 8×8 XCaaS (eXperience Communications as a Service), a single-vendor platform. It includes fully integrated, cloud-native contact center, voice, team chat, video meetings, and communications platform-embeddable API capabilities.

8×8’s Hunter Middleton

Hunter Middleton is chief product officer at 8×8. He said contact centers are making further advancements to support working from anywhere.

“With 8×8 Contact Center, organizations can leverage the full power of the 8×8 XCaaS platform,” said Middleton. “They bring together a comprehensive toolbox of composable employee and customer experience capabilities with high reliability and security. 8×8 Agent Workspace makes it easier than ever for contact center agents to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness so that every customer interaction is a great one.”

8×8 Agent Workspace is highly intuitive, developed using universally friendly and familiar design patterns, the company said. It allows agents to begin using it immediately, just like they would any other modern, digital interface. Quick access to native communication and collaboration tools, including 8×8 Work, is also available from within the agent interface.

Artificial Intelligence

In other product news, 8×8 has made available its 8×8 Conversation IQ to any 8×8 cloud communications users. The new offering applies conversational artificial intelligence (AI) to help organizations analyze data and make sure the virtual meeting experience is consistent. This is for all user roles, from the contact center to the front desk and the back office.

Like Agent Workspace, 8×8 Conversation IQ is delivered via the 8×8 XCaaS platform. This enables team leaders and supervisors throughout an organization to oversee, evaluate, score and analyze voice interactions anywhere in the organization.

8×8 Conversation IQ also supports voice interactions on Microsoft Teams endpoints via the 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams integration.

At least twice as many employees outside the contact center are interacting with customers. Typically, 10%-12% of employees work as formal agents in contact centers. However, 24% of employees are using CX applications to interact with customers, according to Metrigy’s CX and Workforce Optimization 2021-22 study of 524 companies.