Zoom Contact Center Review

In Q1 2022 Zoom entered the contact centre space with the launch of its omnichannel CCaaS solution, incorporating hundreds of features, and integrated UCaaS, in Zoom’s familiar, user-friendly interface. Voice, video, SMS, chat are all covered, with a significant USP being Zoom’s native video capabilities, offering enterprise CX leaders a more personal, high-touch customer communications channel.

Having spent much of the last decade working with the modern cloud CCaaS and AI platforms, Zoom Contact Center piqued our interest. It offers a trusted, fast-innovating collaboration platform which combines Zoom’s existing business phone, team chat, meetings, spaces, events, and AI, with the contact centre functionality. It’s also an interesting coincidence that Zoom positions itself as a platform to remove friction and create happiness, which aligns neatly with Acceleraate’s vision – to build relationships that last, by removing friction and reducing effort.

Here’s a review of some of the key Zoom Contact Center features and, more importantly, the benefits for your organisation.

Video CCaaS

Video has traditionally been difficult to deliver in a fully integrated manner for contact centre but, as a video-first platform, Zoom puts an end to that challenge providing simple elevation to video directly from the Zoom application. Uniquely, Zoom also offers a customisable video waiting room experience, in which clients can deliver branded content, videos, and even self-service tools to get the interaction started before an agent even joins the call.

Over the years we have seen hundreds of potential use cases for video in customer services, across retail, insurance, financial services, energy, utilities, travel, logistics, public sector, including, hybrid experiences, online consultations, fault reporting, fault finding, and many more. Video offers a much more personalised experience for customers and could also be leveraged tactically, for example, for high value interactions.

Native AI

Zoom Contact Center offers native AI to help remove friction from customer service interactions. Zoom Virtual Agent is an intelligent conversational AI and chatbot solution which enables businesses to communicate at scale, whilst delivering highly personalised experiences.

Unlike many chatbots, Zoom Virtual Agent does not require extensive coding, instead offering proprietary AI and machine learning technology to accurately interpret what your customers and employees are asking - delivering a lower TCO and a better user experience.

At Acceleraate we view CX AI slightly differently to other system integrators. Whilst many focus purely on delivering operational targets, such as contact deflection and handle time reduction, we flip it on its head and focus on CX and EX improvement by removing friction and reducing effort. Why? Because this approach delivers all of the efficiency gains, but it also drives-up loyalty. And businesses crave loyalty, because loyalty delivers the things that matter most – retention, repeat business, and reputation.

Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Virtual Agent provides us with all the native tools we need, to make improved loyalty a reality for our clients.

End to end Collaboration

Internal collaboration has long been a head-scratcher for CCaaS users. With limited integration from contact centre to the back-office functions, customer service agents struggle to obtain the information, or the person they need to fully answer service queries. This creates unnecessary friction and effort, leading to repeated contacts, and repeated conversations – something that 96% of customers surveyed by Gartner said would make them disloyal to a brand.

Zoom now solves this challenge by offering fully native, integrated unified communications across the organisation. With Zoom Phone for back-office, and Zoom Contact Center for customer service and Help Desk, departments are no longer disconnected, and users do not need multiple apps to collaborate instantly and effectively. Add in the ability to integrate your customer data sources (CRM, service desk, ERP, knowledge base, data lake), and it’s easy to see how enterprise and SMB clients can create better customer and employee experiences with Zoom.

Create Effortless Experiences

The extensive call routing tools in Zoom Contact Center allow you to route calls to specific agents based on categories or skill levels. But Zoom goes well beyond traditional skill levels enabling users to tweak the routing profiles to represent a mix of specific competencies within a category.

The ability to swiftly connect callers to an experienced agent, or the same agent they spoke to last time, helps to quickly address issues whilst laying the groundwork for lasting relationships that foster brand loyalty.

Simplify IT & Operations

By integrating unified communications with contact centre capabilities with Zoom, organisations can discover new ways to collaborate, drive efficiency, and simplify IT.

With a single platform, single vendor, and consolidated billing, as a fully managed service, the burden of IT management is relieved. Whilst Zoom’s familiar and straightforward interface offers system admins and Helpdesk advisors a much-simplified administration experience, enabling instant provisioning, and real time changes.

Rapid Onboarding; Better EX

One of the major challenges for contact centre operators is the length of time it can take to fully onboard new joiners. In our experience it can take 3-6 months before an advisor is fully up to speed, and this lead time impacts efficiency, cost, and ultimately the customer service experience. Advisors also report significant frustration with the number of tools and browser tabs they are expected to use, to get the job done.

We have long been focused on strategies to reduce agent onboarding time, to make their experience as intuitive as possible, and provide access to the right data and information to guide and coach them through each interaction. However, this is often very challenging, particularly with CCaaS platforms that do not integrate well with UC and/or do not integrate well with customer data sources and knowledge base tools.

Zoom offers a single interface for all users across phone, team chat, meetings, and contact centre, which hugely speeds up the onboarding process for new joiners. The technical learning curve is significantly reduced, allowing department heads and CX supervisors to focus new joiner training on much more valuable content. By better equipping contact centre agents with the right technology, tools, data, and insights we aim to give them an effortless experience which, in turn, translates into an effortless experience for your customers.

In Summary

Zoom may be relatively new to the CCaaS market, however many of the required technologies (voice calls, queues, IVR, routing) were already built and delivered with Zoom Phone over the past 4+ years, and with Zoom Meetings over the last decade. Offering over 200 enterprise grade features and increasing every day, the platform is expanding and innovating at pace. In addition, despite its relative "newness" Zoom recently announced it had won a 2,000 seat contact centre deal which further demonstrates the pace at which the platform is iterating and growing.

Zoom solves a number of the legacy problems experienced by contact centre operators, including UC integration, data integration, single interface, native AI, and powerful analytics.

The platform is also extremely reliable, with recent tests undertaken by Wainhouse confirming that Zoom leads the market when it comes to HD voice and video quality.

With Zoom Phone having already attracted over 5 million business users since its launch, we're now seeing significant demand for Zoom Contact Center, as customer service and IT leaders across EMEA seek to simplify, unify and integrate their communication solutions - removing friction, reducing effort, and building relationships that last.