How Zoom Contact Center will change CX in Australia and New Zealand

Did you ever find yourself in precisely the right place at the right time? After many, many years in the customer experience (CX) industry, I joined Zoom last year with the distinct privilege to create and grow its CX go-to-market business in Asia, Pacific, and Japan. I’ve seen it all, or so I thought. And now, several months later and to plan, Zoom is releasing Zoom Contact Center across the Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) region, and I couldn’t be more excited. This feels like a pivotal point in the CCaaS (contact centre as a service) market and, more broadly, the entire CX industry.

Here’s why.

For years the customer experience industry has been trying to find new ways through technology to lower the barriers between customers and brands. Now, the things we thought were so difficult to solve in the past –– like the ability to look customers in the eye –– are possible with Zoom.

The Zoom Contact Center is a robust, omnichannel engagement platform with video natively built and utilised in the powerful yet simple tool we’ve come to know. This intuitive experience combined with a seamless and unified screen-share, voice, and webchat technology, means that you can now help customers execute tasks such as filling out forms, troubleshooting problems, and finding their way to information on your website. Now, they can engage in the channel of their choice, with the prospect of a significantly enhanced degree of empathetic connection. 

Nowhere more than in ANZ are we ready for our contact centres to have built-in video capabilities that let customer service agents elevate interactions from voice or chat to video. Culturally, we like to connect face-to-face. Statistics released last year revealed nearly 60% of people in the Philippines use their mobile phones to make video calls, 48% in Vietnam, and 43% in Indonesia, against a global average of 38%. And in ANZ, the trend toward video engagement has been clearly documented when it comes to the more complex and sensitive context in mind. 

It’s official, we prefer to see each other, even on the small screen. And there has never been a time where video has been not only accepted as a means of engagement and connection but, in so many ways, is expected.

Our founder and CEO Eric Yuan tells a story of how he started Zoom after becoming frustrated with the geographical distance between him and his girlfriend, now wife. He wanted the ability to click a button and see her face. And that marked the beginning of Zoom.  

Thus began the iteration of extending the familiarity and simplicity of Zoom’s video-first platform in new ways to give people the personal experiences they crave. Today, Zoom Contact Center helps businesses deliver fast, personalised service to customers over various channels, including voice, chat –– and as you would expect –– video. 

Here are some reasons to get fired up about Zoom Contact Center.

During the COVID crisis, our contact centre agents worked from home. As many as 73% could still be there, according to a survey by Metrigy. As consumers, we cut them some slack. We were grateful for any service we could get. Then as we emerged from COVID, we expected a consistently high level of service, despite the environmental conditions. Working from home? Not a problem. 

With Zoom Contact Center, agents are equally effective from any location because they haven’t had to lug a kit bag of software tools with them. No longer confined to the call centre walls, they can work from home or in remote offices. The ability to centralise agents’ internal and external communications from the Zoom platform enables them to deliver frontline services from anywhere. Not only does this hybrid approach help create greater flexibility and job satisfaction (which can reduce costly staff turnover and elevate agent experience), it opens the doors for organisations to recruit agents from a broader talent pool.

“It takes 12 positive customer experiences to make up for one negative experience.” Ruby Newell-Legner, Understanding Customers.

Just as Zoom helps eliminate friction from working flexibly, it also makes no compromises on self-service. With mobile apps making life easier, people’s expectations of service quality are rising, while poor experiences are becoming intolerable. Delivering a slightly less terrible customer experience than your competitor is no longer an acceptable strategy. Since 69% of consumers first try to resolve their issues themselves, intuitive self-service is essential. 

Zoom Virtual Agent is Zoom’s conversational AI and chatbot solution designed to give customers relevant and personal responses immediately, thus avoiding queuing for a live agent. The great thing about Virtual Agent is it delivers service personalisation 24/7 if you want it to.

The Virtual Agent’s natural language processing helps accurately detect what customers need and then guides them to simple actions for frequently-faced problems, like paying a bill or getting updates on a shipment, without speaking to an agent. Offloading these enquiries reduces agent call load and can potentially skyrocket productivity. And it’s important to note that Virtual Agent can intelligently hand-off interactions to an agent whenever needed, including a full chat history so that the transition is seamless and there is no need for the customer to repeat themselves.

Contact centre operations know they need to foster empathy with the customer. They even understand that happy agents have greater empathy and get better results. Yet empathy is continually underestimated. I’d go so far as to say, get empathy right, and almost everything else becomes peripheral. 

Empathy fuels customer retention, yet only 35% of customers surveyed by Harvard Business Review agreed that companies understand them well. 

So consider the power of giving your agents the means to escalate a call or web chat enquiry to a video interaction to engender a customer’s trust. How about bringing in an expert from another department, region, or even country because they are the best person to help? Nothing’s more likely to make a customer feel heard. The Zoom platform makes it all possible.

Zoom has promoted for years the power of our UCaaS (unified communications as a service) platform for connecting team members in seamless conversations and workflows across the business. Now CCaaS, which underpins Zoom Contact Center and Virtual Agent, extends this incredible power to connect customers to businesses of all sizes across any industry. And it’s redefining the landscape for CX. 

Find out how you can transform your CX with Zoom Contact Center.