8x8 Releases Virtual Contact Center 8.1

8x8 has released Virtual Contact Center 8.1 to facilitate customer responsiveness and build loyalty through personalized, omnichannel customer experiences.

Three new release offers three key components, Proactive Web Engagement, Customer Connection Scripting, and Direct Agent Connect, to provide contact centers with a framework for building customer satisfaction and generating increased revenue for their companies.

"Designing a consistent experience across multiple channels is key to building profitable relationships with customers, old and new. An important success factor is having the tools and processes in place to painlessly create these experiences," said Sheila McGee Smith, principal analyst at McGee Smith Analytics, in a statement. "Virtual Contact Center 8.1 brings sophisticated contact center functionality, such as a comprehensive multichannel routing design environment and proactive Web chat, to an easy-to-implement cloud-based solution, significantly increasing the business value and ROI for new and existing 8x8 customers."

8x8 Virtual Contact Center 8.1 features the following enhancements:

• Proactive Web Engagement: allowing users to increase sales close rates on the Web by bridging the gap between Web self-service and live agent interactions by sending an offer for a chat interaction based on behavior on the Web. Users can also define the buttons, chat invites, and popup forms that the customer will see when a chat offer is made using the configuration tool and manage the customer experience through a scripting tool with flexibility to decide when to offer chat, which invitation to provide the customer, and which chat form to use. Routing rules in the script identify the best agent or queue based on information about the customer as well as the status of the contact center.
• Customer Connection Scripting: offering a single scripting environment that manages interactions across all channels. Users can proactively engage customers on the channel of their choice or respond when they reach out, connect customers to the right agent and arm that agent with the right information to solve the customer's problem quickly and efficiently, and ensure a consistent customer experience across all channels by providing a single tool to define the flow of interactions via voice, email, chat and the Web.
• Direct Agent Connect: enabling direct connections between agents and high-value customers to build strong sales and support relationships with key customers. It includes a flexible framework to handle every scenario, such as what to do when the agent is out of the office or on lunch break. Reporting and administrative tools give supervisors insight into direct interactions. Agents can also provide custom greetings to key sets of customers.

"In a world where consumers control how and when they engage with the companies they do business with, having an effective, multichannel customer engagement strategy is an imperative businesses can't ignore," said Darren Hakeman, 8x8's senior vice president of product and strategy, in a statement. "Virtual Contact Center 8.1 brings together all of the capabilities and tools businesses need to ensure successful customer interactions packaged in the fastest to deploy, easiest to use cloud-based solution available."

Virtual Contact Center version 8.0, which 8x8 launched in January, offered increased mobile and security features.

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