Urupong - stock.adobe.com
Zoom doubles down on customer experience in UCaaS play
Zoom is going beyond its roots in employee experience as it looks to strengthen its position in the unified communications-as-a-service market
Zoom is doubling down on its customer experience (CX) capabilities, going beyond its roots in driving employee experience through its conferencing and collaboration tools as it looks to strengthen its position in the unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) market.
In recent years, the company has been adding new CX capabilities such as Zoom Contact Center, an omnichannel cloud contact centre platform that is optimised for video and supports multiple communications channels.
This lets contact centre agents handle customer queries using multiple channels including voice and webchat, as well as an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot.
“We’re going heavily into the contact centre space as a way of driving that whole customer experience,” said Ricky Kapur, head of Asia-Pacific at Zoom, during a media briefing at the company’s new Singapore Experience Hub.
“With our video-powered contact centre, you can chat with an agent via conversational AI, get on a phone call, which is what we are used to, or immediately press a button to see an agent over video.
“For some use cases, face-to-face conversation and empathy is important, because sometimes you want to see if the customer is smiling or unhappy,” he said. “You want to be able to pick that up fast, and so we see a lot of interest across the board.”
Noting that employees demand powerful collaboration capabilities in a hybrid world and that employees are also customers, Kapur said customer experience has become increasingly hybrid.
Read more about customer experience in APAC
- Pendula’s conversational messaging platform lets businesses draw on internal and external data to cross-sell and upsell their offerings while improving customer retention.
- Consumer expectations of chatbots have risen in tandem with improved performance of AI applications over the past year, a study has found.
- TDCX’s work in managing customer experience and content moderation for its clients starts with improving the experience of its own employees.
- Great Eastern has rolled out a new digital platform to better serve customers while morphing its DNA from the inside out.
To that, Zoom has developed a virtual kiosk mode for Zoom Rooms that organisations can deploy at offices, hotels and other locations to provide customers with access to a virtual or in-person receptionist – without having to manage a front desk full time.
Kapur said Zoom Rooms is also being used by organisations such as regional super app Grab to power their conference rooms, bringing Zoom capabilities into physical spaces. It is also used by Singapore’s courts to conduct virtual court hearings.
Underpinning all of Zoom’s CX capabilities is the use of AI. For example, with Zoom IQ for Sales, sales representatives can tap generative AI to analyse customer recordings and find out how well they did during a call. “It will also give insights to managers, so it’s also automating learning and development,” said Kapur.
The same Zoom IQ engine can also be used by employees to summarise meetings and share the summaries with coworkers, as well as draft chat messages based on the context of a team chat.
A 2022 study by Enterprise Strategy Group found that improving CX was the top demand driver of unified communications and collaboration tools, followed by employee experience and the need to support remote and hybrid work.
The adoption of UCaaS platforms has accelerated in recent times, with nearly half of organisations already using such platforms in the past two to three years.
Besides improvements in both customer and employee experiences, UCaaS users reported time savings in managing and operating their environments, as well as simplifying integrations between contact centres, social messaging channels, and web and mobile interfaces.
Enterprise Strategy Group is a division of TechTarget
