Zoom on Zoom: How we’re reinventing customer experience from the inside out

As the dust settles on the AI revolution, it’s easy to see why customer experience needs to evolve. To remain brand loyal, today’s consumers expect instant, accurate resolutions, self-service chatbots, personalized interactions, and channel choice. But as 65% 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. 

As some CX analysts predict, the average virtual agent will become more integrated within customer engagement platforms, paving the way for responsive AI Agents that provide a more personalized experience. With that transition, businesses will need to focus on bolstering their CX capabilities by leveling up their AI agents to handle low-value interactions autonomously, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex tasks. 

At Zoom, we’ve seen this transformation firsthand with our AI-first self-service solution, Zoom Virtual Agent, built and deployed by Zoomies. Part of the broader Zoom CX suite of products, ZVA enables customers to get the support they need, whenever they need it. 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 97% self-service resolution rate—that is, 97 out of 100 customer conversations with our intelligent virtual agent are resolved successfully without involving a live agent. This success has driven broader improvements: our CSAT has increased by 28%, query no-match rates have lowered by 35%, and average handling times have decreased. 

But we didn’t start out this way. 

Like many companies with rapid growth, Zoom’s landscape and technical requirements 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 each month, it was time for a change.

Today’s consumers crave personalized experiences, and as many as 85% expect agents to be friendly, and 82% to be knowledgeable. Following the launch of Zoom Contact Center in 2022, we acquired the conversational AI platform, Solvvy, and began developing Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA).  

As part of ZVA’s workflow development, we’ve uncovered new insights into the customer journey that were missing from our previous chatbot. 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. 

And when it comes to redesigning workflows, it’s no longer the arduous process it once was. The generative AI flow builder within ZVA makes it easy for the admin team to tweak and improve workflows without involving developers. The team recently added a deeper level of personalization within ZVA. It can now pull more in-depth data to better understand the customer and provide steps for them to take according to their specific plan or package. It’s changes like these that can be quickly tested and adjusted that are adding significant value. As Yuliya Pierce, digital customer experience leader here at Zoom, shared:

“The recent personalization that we introduced is driving positive results. Since we launched it, our CSAT has increased by over 10% in just a few months!”

Who hasn’t been in a situation, as a consumer, where you’ve hit a wall with a chatbot? You can’t get any further, yet you can’t get through to a human.

To help avoid those frustrating moments, the Zoom customer experience team integrated Zoom CX with our ServiceNow knowledge base to facilitate faster and more accurate responses. ZVA now has multi-intent matching to better route customers contacting Zoom with everyday issues. For the more complex issues, we’re leveraging retrieval augmented generation (RAG). By feeding RAG a library of comprehensive articles, ZVA can reference multiple knowledge base sources to create comprehensive, precise, and personalized answers for customers. This means self-service can solve most queries, speed up resolutions, and lower handle times. Jeff Harling, head of digital customer experiences, is excited about the results:

“The integration of RAG is a huge win for us. It’s leveraging AI to improve the ability for ZVA to respond to customers’ more abstract questions.”

When the time comes to hand off a query to a live agent, the agent can use Zoom AI Expert Assist to find answers in real-time using the same in-depth knowledge library ZVA uses.   

Understanding the customer journey means studying how and where our users find the support they need. This requires pulling a deeper level of data. Historically, agent assist tools tend to only pull articles from the first query, which is often a greeting. This doesn’t provide much insight into the customer issue. With ZVA, our customer support team can arm themselves with the information they need to adjust flows to match intents. 

“I really like being able to review the queries and then filter by specific queries to identify what customers are asking about,” comments Yuliya. “I can see analytics around how often we match to an intent or if no match exists. This information shows where I need to adjust or add intents, which is what is helping us bring down our no-query match numbers so quickly.” 

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 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies that offer excellent customer service. ZVA’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. With our CSAT scores on the rise and feedback like “There’s nothing to improve. This is the best service assistant I’ve ever experienced,” ZVA is helping us deliver the excellence our customers expect.

Today, our customers can self-serve with more convenience than they’ve ever had. Unlike many chatbots on the market that require extensive coding of keyword variations, our proprietary AI capabilities - namely, natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) technology - can accurately interpret what customers are asking using their natural language. Our next-generation Zoom Virtual Agent takes it up a notch and can handle even more complex queries. It remembers details from previous chats and asks follow-up questions, just as an agent would. This extra level of intelligence requires less maintenance and has a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than traditional “rule-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. More and more businesses are finding ways to implement AI into their CX initiatives to maintain a competitive advantage, with Gartner predicting that chatbots will become a primary customer service channel in the next few years. 

Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Virtual Agent can help you launch AI and machine learning into your own business to generate more significant 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 contact center's performance and modern consumer expectations.

Find out how we can help you:

• Quickly, accurately resolve issues 24/7  
• Reduce handle times
• Increase your CSAT with intelligent hand-offs 
• Access actionable insights 

Contact us today to learn more about Zoom Virtual Agent and Zoom Contact Center.