After nearly two years of research, design, and testing, 8x8 recently introduced Agent Workspace, winner of the Best of Enterprise Connect 2022 Best Innovation in Customer Experience award. 8x8 Agent Workspace is an intuitive, design-led interface that transforms the contact center agent role for the new work from anywhere era by delivering a tailored experience that uniquely blends contact center (CC) and unified communications (UC) capabilities in a single application.

Leveraging universally familiar and user-friendly digital and consumer design principles, it provides powerful contact queuing and handling features that enhance productivity and personalize both agent and customer engagement. As part of 8x8 Contact Center, 8x8 Agent Workspace provides streamlined, automated workflows that present agents with what they need, when they need it.

Get a quick look with this short video:

What customers are saying

Before we launched Agent Workspace publicly, we asked our customers for their thoughts. After 550 touchpoints, input from more than 180 customer beta participants across 26,000 interactions, here are just a few responses. Amye Roberson, Director of Customer Care at Cingo, said, “The look, the feel is cutting edge. I believe that my customers will receive a better customer experience with Agent Workspace because my agents who are working the phones, the email queues and other channels will have an atmosphere that they're comfortable in. They're not fighting the software to try to help the customer.”

Dave Baxter, VP of Sales at Sparkhound, noted, “The new agent workspace is very modern. It's going to make it easier for agents to quickly navigate through the toolsets and be able to execute their job in a more streamlined fashion. It will definitely improve the customer experience because agents can really focus their time on helping the customer and not having to worry about the tools themselves.”

What analysts are saying

Industry analyst reception has been equally positive. Here’s a sampling of comments:

Liz Miller VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research noted on Twitter that Agent Workspace is a “reimagined workspace designed around how agents work, not how WE want them to work. 8x8’s redesigned workspace brings agents what they need instead of wasting hours of training time to get agents to use their technology more efficiently."

Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research wrote on ZDNet, “Agent Workspace, which leverages XCaaS, supports the changing needs of today's contact center agents by connecting all types of interactions. It equips agents with automated workflows and a seamless experience across different channels. Omnichannel support provided by the app includes chat, email, SMS, social media, and messaging. Contact center agents have all these features available in one interface, so conversation history moves with the customer from channel to channel.

Elka Popova VP, Senior Fellow, Information and Communications Technologies at Frost & Sullivan noted on Twitter, “8x8 Reimagines the Contact Center with 8x8 Agent Workspace. In a Frost & Sullivan survey, 20% of tech decision-makers place configurable features by user type among the top 3 factors influencing their provider selection-outranked only by security (25%).”

Robin Gareiss, President and Founder of Metrigy wrote in her Metrinote: 8x8 Announces Agent Workspace, Conversation IQ, “Agent Workspace provides an uncomplicated and customized user interface with links to customer data and AI-powered applications to help agents do a better job. As CX innovation continues on its rapid pace, offerings like these are important to avoid technology overload."

She also says in her same research note that, “Among CX leaders who have integrated UC and contact center, 74.5% say an integrated user interface is a ‘must-have’ requirement, according to Metrigy’s CX & Workforce Optimization 2021-22 research study.”

Interested in hearing more from industry analysts on this subject? Watch TalkingPointz Founder and Principal Analyst Dave Michels in The Hybrid Journey of the Future: Winning Strategies to Outpace Customer Expectations. Check out this preview below:

Or, take a deep dive into the offering itself in this webinar: Meet the New Face of 8x8 Contact Center: Agent Workspace.