Connected conversations and making customer experience effortless

On the sidelines of B2B Tech Asia in Jakarta, amid myriad enterprise conversations and software solutions showcases, Koh Choon Khee of 8×8’s Product and Content Marketing Manager offered Enterprise IT News, a clear perspective on how customer experience is quietly being reshaped – not through visible disruption, but through seamless, invisible interactions.

“The best 8×8 experiences are the ones you never notice you’re having,” Choon Khee said, leaning into the idea that the company’s technology is most powerful when it fades into the background. “We’re the technology behind the brands you already interact with.”

That invisibility, she explained, is not accidental but a deliberate design philosophy centered on reducing friction in everyday interactions. Whether it is messaging a retailer on WhatsApp and receiving an instant, accurate response, being securely verified by a bank without cumbersome steps, or speaking to a customer service agent who already understands the issue, the goal is consistency without effort.

Three quiet ways

She explained that when a business runs on a connected platform like ours, your experience changes in three quiet ways. 

“You don’t repeat yourself, because context follows you from channel to channel. You wait less, because AI handles the routine instantly. And you’re safer, because authentication is built in.”

Individually, these may seem like incremental improvements. Collectively, Choon Khee said, they define whether a customer interaction feels effortless – or frustrating enough to drive users elsewhere.

For 8×8, Southeast Asia represents a critical proving ground for this approach. The region’s mobile-first economies, combined with the rapid rise of conversational commerce, are shaping the company’s strategic focus.

“Our solutions are available globally – and in Southeast Asia specifically, we’re making a concentrated bet on conversational commerce, building purpose-built solutions for the world’s most advanced mobile-first economies,” she said.

A key challenge, however, lies in eliminating the fragmentation that still defines many customer journeys. According to Choon Khee, the weakest point in most systems is the handoff between channels or agents.

“The key insight is that the handoff is exactly where experiences break – so the innovation has to be about making context travel with the customer, automatically,” she explained.

Three core areas

To address this, 8×8 is investing in three core areas. The first is a unified data layer that ensures every interaction – regardless of channel – feeds into a single, continuous customer record. “The conversation has a single memory, rather than each channel starting cold,” Choon Khee said.

The second is the development of AI agents capable of carrying context across platforms. “In 8×8 AI Studio, one agent can work across WhatsApp, web, and voice as a single continuous thread – and because it’s connected to your systems through tools, it can act mid-conversation rather than passing you to ‘another department.’”

The third – and most critical – innovation lies in redefining escalation itself. Instead of treating transitions from AI to human agents as a break in the experience, 8×8 is working to make them seamless.

“Most competitors treat escalation as a break – the AI stops, a human starts, and context gets lost in the gap,” she noted. “What we’ve built is in-thread escalation: a customer can go from an AI-powered WhatsApp chat directly into a live voice call with an agent who has the full context of that conversation already in front of them. No transfer, no repeat, no restart.”

“That seamless continuity- within the same thread – is what makes it feel like one experience rather than a relay race,” she added.

Looking ahead, Choon Khee sees a fundamental shift underway in how AI is positioned within enterprise platforms. The next phase moves beyond standalone features like chatbots or transcription tools toward something more foundational.

“For us, the shift is from AI as a feature to AI as the connective layer of the whole platform,” she said.

Two waves

She described the evolution in two waves: the first defined by systems that “answer and record,” and the next by systems that act and anticipate. “The next wave is agentic and predictive: AI that takes action across your systems, and analytics that move from telling you what happened to telling you what’s about to happen, and what to do about it.”

This vision extends to new communication channels and deeper trust infrastructure. 8×8 is investing in technologies such as RCS, AI-powered voice bots, and generative AI-driven WhatsApp flows, while also strengthening fraud prevention through GSMA-powered APIs.

As AI becomes more embedded in customer interactions, she emphasised that trust will become just as important as functionality. “As AI handles more of the customer journey, the integrity of those interactions becomes critical,” she said.

Over the next 12 to 24 months, this shift will redefine how businesses view customer experience platforms. Rather than serving as tools for handling support tickets, they will evolve into operational control centers.

Operating system

“The unified workspace stops being a place where agents just handle tickets, and becomes the control layer – where people and AI agents work side by side; where you design, deploy, and supervise a whole fleet of agents; and where analytics is the steering wheel, not the rear-view mirror,” Choon Khee said.

In that context, the narrative around AI is also changing. “So the narrative isn’t ‘we have a chatbot’ anymore,” she concluded. “It’s that you have one place to orchestrate every conversation and every action – human or AI – across your entire business.

“That’s how customer experience stops being a cost centre and starts being the operating system for how a company shows up for its customers.”