UC Roundup: COVID-19, Stay-at-Home Prompt Call Center Evolution

… integrations that offer customers the ability to:

• Make and receive calls with 8×8 Contact Center and Microsoft Teams.
• Drive customer engagement and sales success.
• Improve overall effectiveness of outbound campaigns.
• Expand workforce management functionality with Verint Monet and Verint Enterprise.
• Build customer trust.
• Expand global customer reach.

Meghan Keough is 8×8‘s global vice president of product marketing.

8×8’s Meghan Keough

“The latest 8×8 enhancements highlight the benefits our partners’ customers can gain by having an integrated cloud contact center and communications product from a single provider,” she said. “According to Metrigy Research, companies integrating cloud communications and contact center with a single provider saw substantial benefits when compared to those using multiple providers.”

Being able to sell a single-vendor, integrated cloud contact center and communications product gives partners more offerings that they can bring to their clients to deliver more value for mutual customers, Keough said.

“With this release, 8×8 partners are able to better help how their clients monitor and coach their distributed contact center agents or sales teams through the use of 8×8’s quality management and speech analytics for both inbound and outbound customer engagement,” she said.

The number of partners selling integrated cloud contact center and communications grew by more than one-third year over year.

Microsoft Teams continues to see unprecedented growth and adoption, Keough said. Therefore, 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams provides partners with a distinct competitive advantage. It presents upsell as well as add-on services opportunities.

“8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams is significantly differentiated from what any other vendor offers today,” she said. “[It offers] an enterprise-grade, easy-to-administer global telephony direct routing solution for organizations that keeps the Microsoft Teams experience unchanged for end users.”

8×8‘s global cloud approach allows it to continually inject new, innovative enhancements into its integrated contact center and communications product, Keough said. That makes it easy for organizations to engage, work, manage and optimize interactions between employees and customers.

Uniphore Solutions to Strengthen Contact Center Customer Experience

Uniphore, a conversational service automation (CSA) provider, has added its new U-Trust portfolio and U-Assist Assurance solution to its portfolio.

These new solutions improve all contact center interactions from start to finish. They strengthen the connection between front-end customer experience and backend fulfillment through robotic process automation (RPA). They also improve contact center security through agent verification and data security.

The U-Trust portfolio includes two solutions. U-Trust Agent is a verification solution that uses a voiceprint to authenticate agents. U-Trust Environment protects sensitive customer data.

Using RPA technology, U-Assist Assurance tracks promises and commitments made by agents in real-time during the call. It aligns expectations with the customer following the call and manages fulfillment post-call.

Umesh Sachdev is Uniphore‘s co-founder and CEO. He said the solutions align with contact center evolution needs.

Uniphore’s Umesh Sachdev

“As contact centers and business process outsourcings (BPOs) worldwide look to address the future of work, one of the critical factors will be how they ensure they can build customer trust with respect to security and privacy,” he said. “With the U-Trust portfolio, Uniphore customers and partners can now deliver a frictionless and ongoing agent verification to ensure the agents are who they say they are, and also ensure agents do not see or hear any sensitive customer data. This will drive increased customer trust and reduce contact center fraud.”

The pandemic has also accelerated …