Contact centres can improve the experiences for customers, as well as making agents’ lives easier if they embrace AI solutions. Zoom is one company that is looking to disrupt the market by utilising this technology.
Contact centres are a fixture in the UK marketplace in many sectors, but often they still rely on legacy technology that has been built up over years rather than embracing new cloud based solutions created with innovation such as artificial intelligence (AI) at their core. This could mean they are losing out on the chance to become more efficient and deliver a better experience to their customers.
As Ben Neo, Head of Contact Center and CX sales EMEA at Zoom, notes, in the vast majority of contact centres, the technology is still based on-premise. “Many have got a lot of on-premise contact centre technology sat within organisations because it’s been customised and integrated to the nth degree and people find themselves nervous of changing that,” he says.
But now, AI technology is making an impact on the sector. “AI within the contact centre is a disruptive technology that is extremely useful for a customer and an agent, and the business benefits by delivering better service quicker on the terms they want.
“But it’s difficult to retrospectively fit that back onto a premise-based infrastructure that’s not set up for that.”
Supercharged by AI
However, this is where organisations like Zoom come in. They offer all the capability of the legacy systems, but it’s supercharged with AI, says Ben. “At Zoom an AI-first innovation is in our DNA because we’ve always taken that forward-looking approach from the outset: looking at how can technology not just come in and do the norm, but how does it provide it better, faster, easier, cheaper and more efficiently.”
Ben says that businesses are now often looking to consolidate their communication technologies – phone, contact centre, call recording – and add AI on top of that to enhance the experience, both internally and externally.
“AI is just the norm for us at Zoom,” he adds. “We don’t have any technical debt of having to maintain an on-premise world. We’re able to come in and integrate with what customers already have. We’re not asking them to replace any of their back-end systems, everything’s in this one platform, we do this without any bolt-ons.
“The pandemic showed us that technology is a force for good as it provided people with hybrid working and things like that. But it also exposed some of the some of the frailties of a legacy-based, premise-based deployment, because it wasn’t built for that. Now that hybrid working has become the norm, and agents want to work wherever because they work-life balance. You’re looking at the legacy technology being able to provide that and some struggle to do that. This is where there is an opportunity to upgrade.”
Experience enhancements
Zoom brings numerous advantages to a contact centre operation, such as advanced chatbots, Ben says. “We’ve got Zoom Virtual Agent, which is a low code, low maintenance, natural language conversational chatbot,” he explains. “This takes information about a customer – hopefully information that already exists on the system from when they previously called in – to try and predict what they want, to try and help them in a simple way that’s personalised to the customer.
“For instance, the customer can engage with the chatbot in their own language, it understands it, and can then come back to them in a natural language conversation. Normally chatbots are quite sequential and there’s lots of questions. The way the Zoom Virtual Agent does it, it’s like a normal conversation that I would have with a human agent, so you have those multiple parts of information that you have in a natural conversation.”
But while many customer journeys start in the digital space with a chatbot, sometimes the chatbot can’t facilitate all of what a customer needs. AI can help here too. “With AI you’re able to take all that information and engagement that the customer has just had with the chatbot and transfer it to a human agent, so the agent knows the context and the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves,” says Ben.
“The AI will then continue to help the agent through that engagement through Zoom Expert Assist. A lot of an agent’s time on any call is spent trying to find information. The AI can find relevant information and serve that to the human agent they can be more contextual and helpful during the engagement itself – information the agent previously had to find themselves while on the call.
“We try to predict what the customer is trying to do and hopefully automate a lot of it. But for what we can’t automate, we look to help the agent and support that engagement so they can deliver the information in a very human, natural way.”
AI can also help agents once a call has ended. “The AI helps the agent complete the post-call summarisation,” says Ben. “This means the agent doesn’t have to write up all their notes, which typically might take six or seven minutes. AI can cut that down to about 45 seconds. This means they can go onto the next call faster. This can help to bring down waiting times for customers, thus providing another bonus for customers and organisations.
“AI is not a replacement for the human agent, it’s a companion to them. And alongside the human agent, it helps the organisation to provide a brilliant service.”
Making waves
This AI-first approach is part of how Zoom is looking to disrupt the contact centre market. “Zoom does a great job of looking into industries where maybe innovation has been slow for a while because it’s dominated by a few big players and providing a fresh approach,” says Ben. “We’re doing that at speed, and we’re making big waves with customers in the market.
“From a standing start of zero customers in about two and a half years, we’ve got 1,300 customers globally that are using the contact centre solution. And some of those are mission critical services being delivered either by our Zoom Virtual Agent or the Zoom Contact Centre or a combination.”
Zoom’s solutions are aimed at businesses of all sizes, Ben adds. “Our solution is enterprise ready,” he says. “The innovation is there. But it’s one solution. We don’t differentiate. The pricing is the same. We often find that smaller organisations have got more complex requirements than some of the larger enterprise customers. Therefore, the fact that we built in a lot of functionality into our standard licencing models, we packaged it all up accordingly, and there’s so much functionality into that is really appreciated by smaller customers. Previously, they’ve had to buy all that functionality separately but consolidating that into a single platform as Zoom does makes a lot more sense for them.”
Security
Zoom’s solution is also very secure, Ben adds. “We’re sat on the same platform that 300 plus million people use daily,” he says. “All the security that we’ve got in there, the encryption, the localisation of data centres, the redaction side of things, GDPR, everything is completely secure. We also do not train our AI models on any customer data either.
“We’re very open about our security accreditations and the standards that we apply to, which is on our website. Arguably, we’re one of the most secure platforms out there in the market.”
Importance of partners
Ben adds a crucial part of Zoom making inroads into the contact centre market is working with partners. “We can’t do that on our own,” he says. “We embrace partners because they have been in the industry for a long time and a lot of their customers are the ones struggling to move and would like an option to. They’ve got the relationships and the trust but, more importantly, they’ve got the experience on how this solution has now evolved to where it is today. They also provide the managed services and project management, which is important.”
Zoom is also looking to sign up more partners to deliver these customer experience journeys to their customers through its global partner programme, Ben adds. “It’s a very structured programme to onboard, certify and technically enable a partner, and then help them sell and keep up with the innovative road map deliverables that are there,” he says.
Future
Ben says that Zoom is continually improving and updating functions such as the Zoom Virtual Agent. “We will continue to make that more naturally conversational and continue to tweak those models to ensure they are able to be as personal as possible and more context-driven, so that the responses are delivered in a very empathetic and as much of a human-like way as a chatbot could do.”
In addition, as announced at ZoomTopia recently, Zoom will be bringing out a virtual voice agent as well, Ben says. “The voice agent is built on the same platform as the Zoom Virtual Agent. We’re using the same language models. It will still access all the information the same way.
“Our solutions are going to continue to get better, more efficient and more useful as time goes on.”
As the technology advances, then so will the interest in it from the call centre sector. Ben says that Zoom sees a lot of opportunity in this sector. “A lot of contact centres are still on premise and therefore a lot of people that can’t take advantage of the new technology because of where they’re starting from,” he says.
“But that world is moving on, everything is moving towards a cloud infrastructure state and AI and those that are looking to move with it, hopefully, we’re able to convince them to invest in Zoom.”
