Acer delivers smart self-service with 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant

The Challenge: Simplifying customer support processes

Back in 2018, Acer decided to migrate to the cloud and consolidate all of its communications onto 8x8’s unified platform. As a result, it gained greater visibility into the customer experience across its regional contact centers. Moving from disparate, siloed systems into one centralized solution has been a huge plus to agent productivity at Acer. Plus, 8x8 has provided Acer with greater visibility into the customer journey at every juncture, from the first touchpoint of answering a call with 8x8 Analytics.

As a next step, Acer started talking with 8x8 about adding a new dimension to their communications setup. They were interested in enhancing the customer experience even more, especially when it came to assistance with the millions of products and various warranty types.

The team at Acer was looking to simplify some of its processes to help customers get answers even quicker while keeping agents efficient, streamlined and engaged. Acer told 8x8 that they had evaluated other automation options, holding out until they found the right fit. After getting a better understanding of Acer’s goals, the team at 8x8 suggested implementing 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant (ICA.)

The Solution: Self-service powered by conversational AI

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 channels. ICA 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, ICA delivers smart self-service across voice and digital channels to automatically handle customer requests.

For Acer, the 8x8 feature was the perfect solution. From start to finish, it took only four weeks for the chatbot to go live, and the team at Acer spoke highly of both the product and working with 8x8 as a whole. “​​The implementation was very quick—we almost didn’t believe it. It was very impressive,” says Gary Boucher, Partner Manager at Acer. “8x8 definitely has a winner with Intelligent Customer Assistant,” he added.

Now, Acer has a fully operational, automated chat feature in its contact center, with both SMS and WhatsApp options for customers. The bot was designed to be naturally conversational with a customer via text, while collecting any necessary inputs to progress the interaction. If the matter requires a live agent, the conversation is seamlessly handed over with complete customer context and bot interaction details, empowering the agent to deliver a personalized, frictionless experience.

The Result: Simpler, faster, and more efficient

With ICA, Acer can rely on the built-in, comprehensive analytics solution to provide actionable insights for true performance optimization. 8x8’s intuitive, customizable dashboards offer the ability to monitor and understand intent metrics, channel-specific data, and conversation insights to improve bot performance. Acer’s team reported that they’re looking at these insights daily to stay on top of everything and have up-to-the-minute analytics.

“Once SMS was live, total bot-to-chat volume increased 15%,” said Boucher. “It appears that those customers who don’t like to call, found their voice through SMS. We are delighted to assist more customers and hopefully that will pay off in terms of repurchase and customer experience,” continued Boucher.

With 8x8 Intelligent Customer Assistant, Acer was able to provide customers with instant access and convenient service while also reducing agent workloads. And with 24/7 access to intelligent self-service, agents can focus on delivering more high touch, impactful service, and it frees up IT resources as business users can easily manage on-going changes and updates with a user-friendly, graphical no-code designer.

“​​We really like the simplicity of it all,” says Boucher.