8x8 AI Routing CCaaS Engine Targets Cross-Enterprise Silos
- Tim Banting
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
TL;DR
8x8 has brought out a new tool called 8x8 AI Routing. It is a system-wide feature that routes customer calls and messages to the right staff member across the company, doing it all as the requests come in.
The 8x8 AI Routing CCaaS Engine stops managers from having to manually update agent skills, which usually takes ages. Instead, it looks at live transcripts and old chat histories to figure out what agents are actually good at. It works across the whole company—not just the contact centre, but teamwork apps and specialist departments too. This means a customer can get through to the right expert straight away without getting stuck at the front desk.
Right now, only a few chosen customers can use it, and the company showed it off at the Customer Contact Week event in Las Vegas.
Buyer Impact Summary
For IT buyers, this update makes life easier. It cuts out the massive headache of setting up and constantly tweaking complicated agent skill lists, which usually takes up way too much time.
By looping in back-office staff and specialists from outside the normal contact centre, company bosses can make better use of the people they already have. Best of all, they do not have to pay for extra software licences for those extra workers.
The system keeps logs you can download to show exactly why a customer was sent to a specific person, which helps sort out any mistakes. Because of this, buyers should see fewer passed-around calls and lower running costs. The catch is that your company's data needs to be clean and up to scratch in the first place, otherwise the automatic skill finder won't work properly.
What: 8x8 AI Routing CCaaS Engine Follows the Consolidation Trend but Demands Data Discipline
The business tech world is under a lot of pressure right now because companies are trying to dump separate, standalone software and bundle everything together. For years, old-fashioned call centres have been stuck with rigid rules for sorting customer calls. These rules do not change on their own, so managers have to spend ages updating them by hand whenever staff learn new skills. This slows everything down, leaving customers stuck in long queues or passed from person to person when the real expert they need sits in a different department.
By making this call-routing tool work across the whole company (covering helpdesk agents, back-office staff, and regular office workers), 8x8 is trying to break down the walls that usually keep different departments completely cut off from one another.
This is exactly where the rest of the market is heading. All the big rivals in the unified communications and call centre space are rushing out similar automation tools to try and link up work tasks across entire companies.
Rivals are spending big on AI to bridge the gap between internal chat apps and the helplines customers actually use. The goal here is to listen to live chats and pick up on the customer's mood to figure out what they need and who can help, rather than making managers type it all in by hand. For companies looking to buy this stuff, the main question isn't whether the software has basic features like chat or video anymore. It is about how well the system links up data across all their different products.
But there is a catch with these automated systems. They only work well if your data is spotless, and they lock you deep into one company's software ecosystem. While building skill lists automatically sounds great for cutting down on admin, the AI still needs a constant stream of good, accurate call data to make the right choices about who handles what.
This causes real problems for companies that use a mix of different software or rely on third-party apps to run their business. Bosses need to think hard about this. They have to decide if saving time on admin is worth the risk of tying their entire company's communication network to just one single technology provider.
Capabilities & Limitations
Capabilities
The software looks at incoming calls and messages, checking live details and the customer's mood. It then suggests updates for an agent's skill list, leaving it up to a manager to click approve.
It helps different teams work together by sending customer questions across different departments. This means a query can go to a regular call centre worker, a specialist, or someone working in the back office.
Managers can download log files that show exactly why the system made a choice. It lists the reasoning, how sure the AI was, and the background details behind every single routed call.
Limitations
The automatic skill finder and the tool that spots what customers want will only work if you already have loads of high-quality chat logs and records of customer sentiment to feed into the system.
To get the full benefits of this company-wide routing, you have to stay locked into 8x8's own system. It might not work nearly as well if you try to link it up with separate, external CRM software.
Managers still have to look over the skills the system suggests, so they can accept or change them before they actually go live.
Signals to Watch
Companies looking to buy this need to watch how well the AI handles odd or unusual customer questions. You don't want the system getting confused and trapping people in endless loops or dragging out call times when things get really busy.
Rivals are bound to speed up their own plans for company-wide AI routing. This is going to put a lot of pressure on prices for standard call centre software that cannot link up with the rest of the business.
Later updates will show us if 8x8 plans to expand its tool so it can pull in messy, unorganized data from outside databases, rather than just using the info from its own app.