6 min read
Updated on June 28, 2023
Published on April 07, 2023
With technology at our fingertips, it’s easy to see why the customer experience has evolved. To remain brand loyal, today’s consumers expect instant, accurate resolutions, self-service chatbots, personalized interactions, and omnichannel support. But as 59% of consumers say they’ll leave a brand after a negative experience, it’s more important than ever to reevaluate your CX initiatives to ensure customer satisfaction.
At Zoom, this means improving opportunities for our customers to self-serve. Our AI-powered chatbot — built and deployed by Zoomies — enables customers to find the answers they need, right when they need them. Whether searching for help with common issues like “Join a Meeting,” or “Upgrade my Account,” or escalating an issue to an agent, our customers can resolve their questions quickly and accurately.
Since we began offering this technology to customers via the Zoom website, we’ve experienced a 93% self-service rate — that is, 93 out of 100 customer conversations with our intelligent chatbot are resolved successfully without needing to involve a live agent. The millions of instant resolutions of customer questions we see translates to a cost savings of more than $13 million every month. Additionally, our AI chatbot helps boost our support team’s best-in-class customer satisfaction (or CSAT) score of 95%.
But we didn’t start out this way.
Like many companies with rapid growth, the landscape and technical requirements of Zoom evolved, and we quickly outgrew the capabilities of our previous chatbot. We needed a scalable solution that would allow us to maintain the high level of customer satisfaction we wanted to uphold. With millions of customer requests and chatbot sessions occurring each month, it was time for a change.
Today’s consumers crave personalized experiences and as many as 72% want immediate service. With this in mind, we launched Zoom Contact Center in 2022 to meet our customers where they are across email, chat, voice, and video. To complement our omnichannel CCaaS offering, we acquired the conversational AI platform, Solvvy, and began developing Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA), which we affectionately call “Zoe,” for customer support.
As part of Zoe’s testing and workflow development, we uncovered new insight into the customer journey that was missing from our previous chatbot. Although we could see who opened the chatbot and when they were handed to a live agent, we lacked transparency into their conversations, the content they accessed, and the steps they took to resolve their issues.
Thanks to ZVA’s advanced metrics and robust analytics, our team could see where and how a customer finds help and redesign our workflows to move them toward a quicker resolution.
“We're able to understand the full user journey during the chatbot interaction, allowing us to tighten up our workflows and use the metrics from our virtual agent to make alterations when needed,” Lawrence Barreca, Zoom Automation Content Specialist said.
One of these adjustments was the ability to help customers join a meeting. Thanks to our chatbot's improved AI technology and analytics, we noticed customers would mistakenly input their 10-digit Zoom Meetings code directly into the chatbot itself. With this new insight, we designed our workflows to recognize this input and redirect the visitor to the “Join a Meeting” login page.
“We saw people trying to use the bot in a way that it wasn't built to support, but there wasn’t much we could do about it with our old tool,” Jason Chipman, Zoom Customer Support Web Experience Manager. “Now, we can solve that problem and it’s a significant win for us.”
Another win came with Zoe’s ability to automatically crawl and learn from Zoom’s extensive catalog of support content. To accomplish this same task with our previous chatbot, we would have had to manually re-create (and then map) a daunting number of help articles, making the chatbot cost-prohibitive to maintain. But this all changed with Zoe.
“Our new virtual agent enabled us to quickly index our entire knowledge base. That was huge because it opens all of our content to our customers,” Jason said. When new help articles are added or existing ones are updated in Zoom’s knowledge base, the chatbot automatically learns from the changes, with no additional maintenance or time investment required.
Part of understanding the customer journey means studying how and where our users find the support they need.
“If an article has a high view rate, but a low resolution, then we can determine if it’s mapped incorrectly or needs an extra step to answer the customer’s query,” Jason said. “With this new data, we can see if a customer repeatedly exits at a specific step and analyze what’s missing.”
Not only can we help our customers solve their issues faster, but our current AI chatbot reduces the burden on our support agents by handling the millions of self-serve interactions we receive each month.
What’s more, it’s been reported that 70% of consumers expect support teams to have full context into why they called. Zoom Virtual Agent's intelligent routing capabilities enable customers to escalate a conversation to a live agent and transfer the chat history seamlessly without making customers repeat themselves. This not only streamlines the engagement between customer and agent but empowers customer service agents to resolve issues with better insight into the customer’s needs.
Today, our customers can self-serve with more convenience than they’ve ever had in the past. Unlike many chatbots on the market that require extensive coding of keyword variations, our proprietary AI and machine learning technology can accurately interpret what customers are asking using their natural language. This extra level of intelligence requires less maintenance and has a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than traditional “rules-based” chatbots — and it delivers a better customer experience.
In a time where we’re all expected to do more with less, it’s not always feasible to hire more agents or outsource work. Not to mention, onboarding can be time-consuming, expensive, and even risky. To maintain the competitive advantage, more and more businesses are finding ways to implement AI into their CX initiatives, with Gartner® predicting that chatbots will become a primary customer service channel in the next few years.
Our enterprise cloud contact center and virtual agent can help you launch AI and machine learning into your own business to generate greater ROI on your digital transformation. Built on the Zoom platform, our customer experience solutions integrate with leading CRMs and help desk software so you can grow and scale your customer service initiatives. And with the help of AI to power our platform, we’re enabling teams to work smarter, together, to meet the growing needs of modern consumer expectations.
Find out how we can help you:
Contact us today to learn more about Zoom Virtual Agent and Zoom Contact Center.
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