8x8, Inc. (NASDAQ: EGHT), a leading integrated cloud contact center and unified communications platform provider, today announced new Proactive Outreach features for 8x8 Contact Center, enhancing customer messaging capabilities and eliminating the reactive nature of customer service. By leveraging 8x8's programmable SMS and WhatsApp capabilities natively in 8x8 Contact Center, organizations can now provide a seamless end-to-end customer experience to send highly personalized, outbound messaging campaigns at scale, with inbound responses directly routing to their agents or bots with full context and rich reporting.

“With Proactive Outreach, mid-size businesses now have access to native notification for SMS and WhatsApp without the need for a third-party solution,” said Sheila McGee-Smith, founder and principal analyst at McGee-Smith Analytics. “Now, instead of ‘do not reply to this SMS’ companies can offer a direct transfer to contact center agents when required.”

For industries in which proactive customer messaging and engagement is especially important, this new solution promises tremendous opportunities to enhance customer engagement. By proactively supplying customers with relevant, necessary information, organizations can increase customer satisfaction and contact center agents can instead focus on more complex, time consuming tasks rather than reactively managing customer issues. Specific examples include:

  • Personalized sales and marketing promotional offers from retailers
  • Appointment reminders and updates from healthcare providers
  • Two-way asynchronous customer service and support
  • Emergency weather updates and unexpected facility closures
  • Time-sensitive alerts and real-time feedback

Key benefits of Proactive Outreach for 8x8 customers include:

  • Proactive Customer Engagement: Increase customer awareness, engagement, and satisfaction for organizations through proactive rather than reactive engagement.
  • Optimize Conversation and Revenue: Drive demand generation by leveraging campaigns, which offers personalized experiences for customers and ensures interactions are both relevant and impactful.
  • Measure Impact: Track outbound SMS performance and expenditure with advanced reporting and analytics as well as delivery receipts for all messages.
  • Reliable Communication Channels: Automatically select the best routes using 8x8’s intelligent message routing to ensure outbound messages are delivered while automated fallback resends undelivered or unread messages to alternative messaging channels, ensuring deliverability.

Key Features include:

  • Notify: One-to-many, personalized outbound messaging, with direct routing, reporting and analytics. Ideal for sales and marketing promotions, reminders, and product announcements.
  • Interact: One-to many & two-way messaging, which includes Notify capabilities plus automation, API access and inbound routing to your contact center agents or bots. Ideal for customer service, support, and real time feedback.
  • Alert: Instant, mass outbound notifications, utilizing pre-made templates for sharing time sensitive, critical information. Ideal for power outages, weather warnings, and emergency situations.

“As customer expectations continue to shift – demanding more and more from organizations – technology vendors need to provide the products that allow organizations to effectively meet those new and changing expectations and demands,” said Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8x8, Inc. “By introducing Proactive Outreach for 8x8 Contact Center, we are enabling organizations to better serve their customers through highly personalized, scalable outbound messaging, enhancing customer satisfaction and empowering contact center agents to be more productive and efficient.”

8x8 Contact Center is built on 8x8’s integrated cloud contact center and unified communications platform, which includes business phone, team chat, video meetings, and SMS capabilities, is a resilient, secure, and compliant cloud platform that offers the highest levels of reliability with a financially backed, platform-wide 99.999 percent uptime SLA across an integrated cloud UCaaS and CCaaS solution.

About 8x8 Inc.

8x8, Inc. (NASDAQ: EGHT) is transforming the future of business communications as a leading Software as a Service provider of 8x8 XCaaS™ (Experience Communications as a Service™), an integrated contact center, voice communications, video, chat, and SMS solution built on one global cloud communications platform. 8x8 uniquely eliminates the silos between Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) to power the communications requirements of all employees globally as they work together to deliver differentiated customer experiences. For additional information, visit www.8x8.com, or follow 8x8 on LinkedIn, X and Facebook.

8x8®, 8x8 XCaaS™, Experience Communications as a Service™, Experience Communications Platform™ are trademarks of 8x8, Inc.