8x8 launches AI Routing for broader customer service

8x8 has launched AI Routing, a system designed to direct customers to the most suitable available employee across its software products.

The routing engine works across 8x8's contact centre, employee communications and customer engagement tools, allowing interactions to be assigned to contact centre agents, subject matter experts or back-office staff.

According to 8x8, the system evaluates each interaction using real-time and historical data, including transcripts, previous history and sentiment, before matching it to a resource. Supervisors can start with a single queue and expand usage gradually.

The launch targets a common complaint in customer service technology: many routing systems rely on manually entered skills that are rarely updated and often send customers into queues instead of to the person best placed to solve their problem.

8x8 said AI Routing can recommend and maintain skill assignments by analysing agent interactions and performance over time. Administrators can accept or adjust those recommendations, while the system continues to reassess data and suggest further changes.

The approach extends beyond the contact centre. If the best person to handle an enquiry sits in billing, customer success or a technical team, the system is intended to route the interaction there rather than keep it within the limits of a contact centre queue.

Analyst view

Sheila McGee-Smith, Founder and Principal Analyst, McGee-Smith Analytics, said the product addresses a long-standing weakness in AI-based routing tools.

"AI-powered routing has long promised a lot, but vendors have largely failed to address one key challenge: automatically assigning and maintaining agent skills and proficiency levels. Using interaction transcripts, previous history, sentiment and other real-time factors, 8x8 AI Routing analyses data, suggests skills and skill levels for each agent, and lets administrators accept or adjust those assignments. The routing engine reanalyses the data to recommend additional skill or level changes based on the agent's actual work, again for admin review," McGee-Smith said.

She added that the broader organisational reach was a notable element of the launch.

"What is even more powerful is that 8x8 can evaluate each inbound interaction and determine who - across the entire enterprise, not just the contact centre - is best equipped to resolve the customer's intent," McGee-Smith said.

Setup and oversight

8x8 said one of the main selling points is speed of deployment. It argued that conventional routing projects can take months to configure and then require regular manual updates as business needs change.

By contrast, AI Routing can build skill profiles and suggest configurations automatically from interaction data, according to 8x8. The company also said the system can detect customer intent without manual interactive voice response mapping.

Supervisors can access audit trails showing why each interaction was sent to a particular resource, including confidence scores and the rationale used by the model. The feature is intended to give managers more visibility into routing decisions as AI tools come under closer scrutiny from businesses and regulators.

The routing layer also connects with other parts of the 8x8 software portfolio, including Intelligent Customer Assistant, AI Studio and IVRs, as well as third-party bots. This allows businesses to use the system across multiple entry points rather than confining it to a single application.

Architecture issue

Hunter Middleton, Chief Product Officer at 8x8, said the main challenge with customer routing has been system design rather than a lack of data.

"The routing problem has always been about architecture," Middleton said.

"The best person for a given customer interaction might sit anywhere in the business, but most systems were never designed to look beyond their own boundaries. 8x8 AI Routing was built differently, spanning all teams and boundaries in the business simultaneously and evaluating the full range of available resources in real time. That's a challenge point solutions fundamentally struggle to solve, and exactly the kind a true platform is built for," he said.

AI Routing is available now for select 8x8 customers.