Was there ever a time when you were exactly where you needed to be at the right time? Having built and grown Zoom’s customer experience (CX) business across Asia, Pacific, and Japan for over a decade, I recently joined Zoom. I thought I had seen it all. We are excited to announce that Zoom Contact Center is launching in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) in the coming months as the result of our hard work over the past couple of months. In general, the entire Customer Experience sector, including CCaaS (contact center as a service), are in the middle of a turning point.

The following are the reasons.

The timeworn challenge of personalising CX  

With the help of technology, organizations are constantly trying to reduce barriers between customers and their brands. With Zoom, we can now do things that were previously impossible – like looking customers in the eye.

In the powerful yet simple Zoom Contact Center tool we know, video is natively built into the powerful and omnichannel engagement platform. You can now assist customers with tasks like filling out forms, troubleshooting problems, and finding information on your website with this intuitive experience combined with seamless and unified screen-share, voice, and webchat technology. Having this option allows them to communicate in their own way, leading to higher empathy.

The ANZ market is more prepared than any other to have video capabilities built into our contact centers to allow agents to take the customer service experience to a new level by using video. Face-to-face connections are important to us culturally. The Philippines reported last year that nearly 60% of its citizens make video calls using their mobile phones, Vietnam 48%, and Indonesia 43%, compared with the global average of 38%. When it comes to more complex and sensitive contexts, video engagement in ANZ is clearly on the rise.

It is important for us to be able to see each other, no matter how small the screen may be. No other time in history has video had such widespread acceptance as a means of engagement and connection.

Meet Zoom Contact Center

Our CEO, Eric Yuan, tells us about the frustration he felt when he grew apart from his girlfriend, who eventually became his wife, because of geographical distance. He wanted to be able to see her face by clicking a button. Zoom was born that day.

With Zoom’s video-first platform, we offer a personal experience people crave that is more familiar and simple than ever before. With Zoom Contact Center, businesses have the ability to provide fast, personalized service online via a variety of channels, including voice, chat, and video.
Zoom Contact Center has many reasons for you to get excited about it, and here are a few of them.

Hybrid working for contact centre agents

There was a time when our call center agents worked from home during the COVID crisis. It is estimated that up to 73% were still there, as a result of a Metrigy survey. It is our responsibility as consumers to be a little lenient with them. Any service that could be provided to us would be much appreciated. Having emerged from COVID, we were expecting a consistently high level of service regardless of the conditions of the environment in which we operated. What are the benefits of working from home? I don’t see any problem with that.

Having Zoom Contact Center on your desktop or laptop does not limit your ability to be as effective from any location because your agents do not have to carry around a kit bag full of software tools with them. Rather than being confined to the walls of the call center, they can now work from anywhere in the world, regardless of their location. With Zoom’s platform, agents can centralise their internal and external communication channels, which allows them to operate from a variety of places and provide frontline services to customers. Using a hybrid approach to recruiting can allow you to recruit agents from a wide pool of candidates and increase their job satisfaction, which can reduce costly employee turnover as well as enhance their overall experience, and also allow you to recruit from more diverse backgrounds.

Agent- and self-service working together in harmony

Ruby Newell-Legner, Understanding Customers, states that to balance out one negative customer experience, it takes 12 positive ones.

Zoom makes no compromises on the level of customer service at all, just as it helps eliminate friction from working flexibly. In today’s world where mobile apps tend to make life easier, people are placing a higher level of expectation on service quality, and people are becoming intolerable when they experience poor service. As a business, it is no longer acceptable to try to deliver a slightly less horrible customer experience than your competition. It is extremely important to provide intuitive self-service for consumers since 69% of them try to resolve their issues by themselves first.

With Zoom Virtual Agent, customers get relevant and personal responses instantly, avoiding the need to wait in line for a live agent, through a conversational AI and chatbot solution created by Zoom. A great advantage of Virtual Agents is that they are able to provide services that are tailored to your needs 24/7 if you so desire.

Using the Virtual Agent’s natural language processing algorithm, which enables the agent to detect what customers need, it provides them with easy steps to solve commonly-asked problems, including paying a bill or receiving an update on a shipment, without requiring them to speak to a real agent. Offloading these enquiries reduces the workload of the agent and can have a significant effect on the productivity of the agents. The Virtual Agent has the advantage of intelligently handing off interactions to an agent if needed, including a complete chat history so that there is no need to repeat either the customer or the agent’s responses to the customer. Thus, the transition is seamless and the customer doesn’t have to repeat his/her statements.

Tapping into the power of empathy

A contact center operation knows how important it is to foster empathy among its customers. There is also an understanding that they get better results when they have happy agents since they have a greater degree of empathy. In spite of this, empathy is consistently undervalued. In my opinion, one of the most important things is to get empathy right, and everything else becomes almost secondary.

According to a study conducted by Harvard Business Review, only 35% of customers agreed that companies really understand them well enough to retain them as customers.

Consequently, you should consider how powerful it can be to give your agents the capability of escalating a call or web chat inquiry to a video interaction in order to build a relationship of trust with your customers. Is there a better way of resolving the problem than to bring in an expert from another department, region, or even from another country that is the best person to help you out? There is nothing that makes a customer feel more heard than hearing them out. It is all possible thanks to Zoom’s platform.

CCaaS will continue to significantly improve CX

As a provider of UCaaS (unified communication as a service), Zoom has been promoting for years the ability of our UCaaS platform to connect team members for seamless conversations and workflows across the organization. It is now possible to extend the power of CCaaS, which underpins Zoom Contact Center and Virtual Agent, to connect customers across any industry and any size business with businesses of any size. It is also redefining the landscape of customer experience in the world today.

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