8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant is a powerful, user-friendly conversational AI solution that enables businesses to create simple to complex automated self-service experiences across customer engagement channels. Intelligent Customer Assistant makes it possible to build highly scalable, always available experiences across multiple regions and languages.

Leveraging conversational AI and a plethora of integrations for advanced customization, Intelligent Customer Assistant delivers smart self-service to automatically handle customer requests. Learn more here or take a quick look at this introductory video:

What customers are saying

Customers including Information and Communications Technology (ICT) leader Acer are confirming Intelligent Customer Assistant is the solution that helps enable their relentless focus on exceptional customer experiences. Notes Program Manager, Gary Boucher, “We chose 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant over other vendors because of its robust features and ease of use. “The overall simplicity belies its complexity on the back end. Additionally, it offers us the option to escalate to live assistance, when necessary, with a seamless handoff from the automated interaction to the contact center agent.”

What industry analysts are saying

We also introduced the product to industry analysts prior to and day of launch. Here’s what they said:

Jon Arnold, Principal, J Arnold & Associates, wrote on his blog, 8x8 is “targeting AI/ML applications across the full contact center spectrum - CAI, WEM, CRM, analytics, automation, etc. The big driver is to help contact centers reduce their biggest cost (labor_, and we’re just starting to see the various ways AI can bring intelligent automation to all these areas.”

Keith Dawson, Vice President and Research Director at Ventana Research, wrote on the Ventana blog, "ICA is entering the 8x8 platform via an OEM agreement with Cognigy, developer of conversational AI systems. Contact center use cases for conversational AI go well beyond chatbots. The technology can (and should) be used to produce real-time agent guidance, to boost upselling and cross-selling, collect voice of the customer data, and numerous agent engagement options. Intelligence added to self-service provides an opportunity to use contact center technology to provide other CX teams (especially marketing) with more or better data on sentiment, loyalty and customer value."

Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research wrote on SiliconANGLE, “Improving customer experience (CX) is a key initiative for almost every business leader I speak with today, as it’s now the top brand differentiator. The challenge for companies today is that there are so many channels and sources of data that even the best-trained agents struggle to provide great service. Enter AI, which can augment people interactions and help companies offer self-service tools, but then give agents more timely information as well.

“Conversational AI can help organizations automate routine customer interactions, provide personalized recommendations and assist agents in resolving complex issues. This removes many of the low-complexity repetitive calls from agents, allowing them to focus on more challenging issues.

“8×8’s new conversational AI solution, Intelligent Customer Assistant, comes with several key features that help organizations achieve those benefits, including a self-service feature that uses natural language understanding and machine learning to handle customer requests through conversations. It supports more than 100 languages, so organizations can build conversation flows once and apply them to any channel. It also comes with graphical scripting tools for building and deploying chatbots across different channels." Watch Zeus’ interview with Jessica Smith, 8x8 Head of CCaaS Product Marketing, here.

Dave Michels, Founder and Principal Analyst of TalkingPointz wrote in his Insider Report, "We got to be the first to hear about the 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant (ICA). The first edition offers versatile self-service over digital channels, but ICA will soon expand to support voice. This is a powerful solution that will be available globally. Why do I trust a ver 1.0 product? Because ICA is 8x8’s integrated version of Cognigy. An extremely powerful CAI platform that just happened to be named a Leader (again) in the recent MQ for Conversational AI Platforms." Watch the same-day discussion between TalkingPointz Founder Dave Michels and 8x8 CTO Bryan Martin.

Sheila McGee-Smith, President and Principal at McGee-Smith Analytics noted on No Jitter, “Since its use in contact centers began, empirical data shows that conversational AI can improve revenue, customer ratings, and agent productivity by over 20 percent, as detailed by Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst at Metrigy, in 8x8’s press release. However, most companies continue to think of conversational AI as something that is too expensive or too complicated for their organization to deploy. 8x8 plans to change that perception with the delivery of the 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant (ICA).

“Starting with digital self-service in the first quarter, and adding voice in the second quarter, ICA will deliver state-of-the-art conversational AI capabilities: graphical scripting tools will allow a single chatbot to be built that can be applied to any channel, (i.e., SMS, WhatsApp, web chat, etc.) in 100+ languages. Later in 2023, 8x8 will add Agent Assist, an AI-powered tool that provides context-aware advice to agents in real-time, during live customer interactions, to better support customers.

“8x8 is bringing a global-friendly ICA to market so quickly as the result of an OEM agreement with Cognigy, one of the leaders in the Gartner 2023 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Conversational AI Platforms. The relationship is a win-win for the two companies.” Learn more about harnessing the power of conversational AI in this webinar featuring Sheila McGee-Smith.

Interested in finding out more about 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant and 8x8’s continued focus and innovation in the contact center space? Read this blog post from 8x8 Head of CCaaS Product Marketing Jessica Smith.