Zoom Contact Center: Transforming customers, agents, and businesses from disgruntled to gruntled

We’ve all heard the news: as the world evolves and automation continues to shape how we work, communicate, and do business, consumers’ expectations continue to soar. People crave more personalized experiences, while customer service agents struggle to keep up and face burnout and low morale. Customer experience (CX) leaders are under pressure to deliver even better results for the business. Agents, supervisors, and customers alike are feeling disgruntled. There has to be a better way. 

We feel your pain. That’s why we’re on a mission to take the ‘dis’ out of disgruntled customer experiences. In recent years, Zoom has helped transform the way the world communicates, but in that process, we saw that CX was still lagging behind in the world of business communications. That’s why we launched our AI-powered, omnichannel cloud contact center.  Zoom Contact Center is built on the familiar Zoom Workplace platform you know and love. Our customer-led approach provides an innovative cloud contact center solution that empowers businesses to deliver the exceptional experiences customers expect and deserve. The end result: Agents and customers are left with that warm glow of delight time and time again.

In the customer service industry, we often hear the word “disgruntled,” but you almost never hear its antonym: “Gruntled.” It’s time to embrace this positive little adjective. And, yes, it’s a real word! Following its recent spotlight on Word Daily’s Word of the Day, gruntled means pleased, satisfied, or contented. As a company dedicated to delivering happiness in everything we do, it feels like the perfect adjective to describe the power of Zoom Contact Center. Gruntled customers and agents are what we’re all here for, after all. Plus, it’s a quirky word to pop into conversations and have fun with, something we’ve embraced here at Zoom.

Now you know what it means, but how does Zoom Contact Center help transform agents and customers from “disgruntled” to “gruntled”? We’re glad you asked!

It’s never been more imperative to keep up with customer expectations. Seamless and efficient customer service interactions are the dream state we’re all striving for. Three things help today’s customers feel satisfied following a customer service experience:

1. Self-service that ‘just works’ and saves customers time

Examining your self-service tools, or more specifically, your chatbot and conversational AI solutions, is a good starting point for delivering the personalized experiences your customers crave. Automating the whole process without careful, well-thought-out flows could leave customers at an infuriating dead end.   

With Zoom Virtual Agent, our AI-powered conversational self-service solution, anyone on your team can easily create custom flows that provide personalized responses. It’s built on a combination of our proprietary conversational AI and natural language processing, along with responsibly used generative AI. These combine to make Zoom Virtual Agent a conversational self-service powerhouse that can better detect customers’ needs and exceed their expectations. It “just works” in the background, effectively managing simpler issues, freeing up your agents to conquer the more complex issues.

Zoom Virtual Agent helps Zoom’s own contact center save a staggering $13 million each year and generate a 95% CSAT for our support teams.

Our customers are experiencing the benefits, too. As CRM lead at Viewrail, Colin Johnson, commented in a recent ‘Hear from a Peer’ webinar:

2. A human touch when it’s needed most for more complex issues

Even with a powerful conversational AI chatbot, it’s critical to find the right balance between human agents and automated interactions. For those times when only a human touch will do, you need an intelligent IVR system that intelligently routes calls based on agent skills and customer attributes. Zoom Contact Center’s IVR feature automatically identifies the need for escalation and routes the customer to the appropriate agent, complete with AI-powered conversation summaries for a smooth transition. Your customers will be relieved to get to the right agent the first time and have their issues resolved without repeating themselves. Warm glow of delight achieved!

3. Meeting your customers where they are on the channel of their choice

These days, we’re all on the go and largely run our lives from our mobile devices. Giving your customers more ways to reach your business with an omnichannel contact center provides a streamlined experience for all involved. The beauty of an omnichannel solution like Zoom Contact Center is that your customers can connect with your team on their preferred channel. At the same time, your agents and supervisors can capture all interactions in one view. This provides a complete customer profile with the opportunity to personalize each interaction and gain more well-rounded insights. Zoom Contact Center allows customers to connect via phone, SMS, video, email, chat, and social channels including WhatsApp and Meta Messenger. 

Our latest innovation, Zoom Kiosks, will enable businesses to communicate via video with customers in their brick and mortar locations without keeping a full staff roster onsite. 

While we’re talking about video, here’s a note about the importance and power of visual engagement. In their latest Zoom commissioned report, Use AI to enhance, not eliminate the human touch, research and advisory firm, Metrigy, outlined some compelling reasons why video might be a worthy channel to add to your omnichannel strategy. Their research shows that revenues increased by 22%, customer ratings improved by 25%, and agent efficiency rose by 18% when visual engagement was used. 

Your customers’ happiness often depends on your agents feeling happy and empowered. That’s why we’re all about getting agents, as well as customers, gruntled. Zoom Contact Center is designed to positively impact every step of the customer journey. Whether a query is resolved entirely by self-service or requires agent intervention, our AI-powered features help deliver a positive experience. 

Your agents are heroes in headsets. Automating repetitive pre- and post-call tasks frees up their time to focus on what they do best — providing excellent customer service. With Zoom AI Companion for Contact Center, our generative AI assistant, agents are presented with conversation summaries to get quick context before a call or when responding to a query. 

During calls, agents are supported by live translation, customer sentiment, and talk speed. Interaction summaries help reduce the post-call burden, allowing agents to move on to the next interaction faster or spend more time on complex queries. It’s a simple tool that helps ease customer frustration and make agents more productive.

Supervisors also benefit from Zoom AI Companion for Contact Center’s powerful capabilities. In a single dashboard, a supervisor can access Zoom Quality Management and monitor live engagements in real time with AI-generated sentiment and conversation summaries. Team leaders can quickly track which agents need support and take swift action. They can go a step further and formulate personalized coaching sessions, scorecards, and guided training according to individual and team performance so everyone feels more in control, even when dealing with the most complex queries.  

While we're talking about complex queries, Zoom’s AI Expert Assist feature helps resolve complicated cases by giving agents faster, real-time access to company records and data. AI Expert Assist can analyze conversations on the spot to surface the right information at the right time to suggest the most effective responses or actions. This saves time wasted digging around for appropriate articles, enabling faster call resolution and the opportunity to deliver the best possible service.

The robust and secure infrastructure of Zoom Contact Center is built on the reliable and familiar Zoom Workplace platform known around the world. By leveraging our federated approach to AI and our speed of innovation (650+ features released in 2 years), we’re improving the customer and agent experience and, ultimately, business outcomes by creating a “total” brand experience. 

One crucial pillar of that “Total Experience” is having one unified communications and contact center solution. As a provider that can bring together the employee and the customer experience (EX and CX) on one native platform, we help businesses lower costs and create seamless customer journeys across their organizations. 

Picture your agents seamlessly reaching back office experts to help with real-time queries and directly transferring customers with AI-generated interaction summaries for smoother hand-offs. That’s the power of a combined EX and CX approach, or “MutliCaaS” strategy, which is available with Zoom Workplace and Zoom Contact Center. It’san approach that's been identified as the key to future success in customer experience, yet only 23% of companies use a single vendor, according to Metrigy’s Transforming Customer Experience report (January 2024). They found that companies adopting this strategy enjoy a 26.5% improvement in customer ratings, an 18% reduction in operational costs, a 22.6% increase in revenue, and a 23.1% boost in employee efficiency.

Offering customers a Total Experience becomes much easier when the whole company is connected and customers’ omnichannel interactions collated into one view. Imagine personalizing each interaction thanks to rich data pulled from every corner of your business. With actionable insights into trending topics, customer satisfaction (CSAT), and the root causes of complaints, you can shift from reactive responses to proactive service improvements to get ahead of issues before they happen. 

And finally no cloud contact center can deliver a Total Experience without  rigorous reliability and security. Zoom Workplace’s scalability, security, and ease of use make it an ideal choice for enterprises. Our commitment to meeting our customers’ requirements is evident with the FedRAMP certification for Zoom Contact Center and support for PCI compliance. No matter how complex your business is, Zoom will work to configure our platform to meet your individual needs. Rest assured that Zoom Phone, our voice product, has a reliable 99.999% SLA that will help your business move forward around the clock while Zoom’s CX solutions ‘just work’ in the background. 

Delivering a fantastic customer experience just isn’t possible without a fantastic employee experience. The two go hand in hand. But what does this look like in practice? A lot of it comes down to a seamless hand-off between agents and back-office subject matter experts. 

Meet Mike. Mike is a longtime Best Card customer. On the first day of his family vacation, he notices a duplicate charge on his credit card. Now he has to call Best Card customer service when he should be relaxing. He’s not happy. Let’s see how it plays out.

• Mike calls Best Card and gets through to customer support agent Hank. Fortunately for Mike, Hank is using Zoom Contact Center.
• While the call is being routed, Hank can preview Mike’s customer data on the IVR to get up to speed and remove the need for any redundant questions, which would only frustrate Mike further. 
• While Hank digs into Mike’s problem and attempts to put him at ease, Zoom AI Companion for Contact Center goes to work for Hank by monitoring his talk speed and noting the customer sentiment, which is understandably negative at the start of the call. 
• Mike starts out frustrated as he talks to Hank, but Zoom AI Expert Assist presents suggested knowledge based articles to Hank to help address Mike’s exact concern about being double charged. Hank can scan the articles during the call without putting Mike on hold. 
• Hank identifies the double charge immediately and reports it for merchant investigation. 
• Hank’s ability to quickly identify the issue and the solution helps Mike’s sentiment shift to positive, and he comments that he is a social media influencer and would love to share his great customer experience with his followers.
• Hank tells Mike about Best Card’s social media influencer program and offers to transfer him to the social media team.
• Enter Jesse, Best Card’s social media expert. Hank finds Jesse in Best Card’s Zoom Contact Center directory and transfers Mike’s call directly to Jesse, along with an AI-generated summary of the interaction. No need for Hank to put Mike on hold while he brings Jesse up to speed, stay on the line for the hand-off, or type up a detailed summary of the interaction.
• Jesse can easily get context and customer sentiment from the summary when she accepts Hank’s transfer without switching applications; everything is visible within the Zoom Contact Center tab of her Zoom app on her desktop. 
• Jesse picks up where Hank left off and signs Mike up for the perks of Best Card’s social media influencer program. 
• Mike hangs up and gets back to his vacation with peace of mind and delight knowing that the duplicate charge has been corrected and he'll be receiving some unexpected goodies.
• Hank reviews the quality of his interaction with Mike in Zoom Quality Management, where he can see AI-generated speech analytics and call insights. He feels chuffed with the overall sentiment score of 76 (out of 100), and he’s energized and ready to help the next customer!  
• It’s a seamless and satisfying experience for Mike, Hank, and Jesse.

With Zoom Contact Center, we go beyond merely enabling better customer experiences by helping businesses of all sizes deliver a "Total Experience" for customers, agents, and supervisors alike. By leveraging AI-powered tools and an omnichannel approach across one unified communications and contact center platform, Zoom empowers agents to deliver exceptional customer service through seamless, personalized interactions. This results in happier customers, happier agents, and even a happier bottom line for your business. 

The future of the contact center is one where customer and employee experiences are not only enhanced but integrated into a unified, streamlined, efficient platform. Join us in the journey towards a more gruntled world, one happy interaction at a time.

We’d love to chat with you about how our AI-powered CX solutions can help you transform your customers, agents, and business from disgruntled to gruntled. 

Learn more about our latest AI innovations and FedRamp certification.

Reach out today, and one of our CX experts will happily answer any questions you may have.