Zoom is leading the pack with AI for Contact Centre and Customer Engagement in 2024

In September 2023 Zoom launched AI Companion - a generative AI assistant which offers several powerful and compelling use cases including meeting summarisation, action items, and chat composition capabilities. And it’s safe to say that our team at Acceleraate have been very impressed with it so far. In fact, we wrote about AI Companion a week after its launch, and our sentiment towards it remains the same now as it was then: It’s very, very good.

AI Companion was initially launched for Zoom Meetings and Zoom Team Chat, but - as a CX technology specialist, and Zoom’s very first CX Competency Partner globally - we were very much looking forward to having this generative AI capability available in Zoom Contact Center. We even said as much in our September review article:

“For us, AI Companion will be a complete game-changer for agent productivity and improving accuracy: Preventing customer service agents from needing to take manual notes, and also automating next steps/follow-up tasks. This will deliver huge efficiency gains and CX improvements for contact centre operators.”

We were really pleased, therefore, when AI Companion for Zoom Contact Center launched in December 2023!

What does AI Companion bring to Zoom Contact Center?

Engagement Preview/Summary

AI Companion can take the transcript of an engagement (for example, from a live chat or chatbot conversation) and auto-generate a summary of the interaction. This is provided to the agent before they accept the engagement, which allows them to understand the context and intent prior to going live with the customer.

Talk Speed & Speech Length

When in a voice engagement AI Companion presents real-time speech metrics to agents, including talk speed and length. This helps to automatically coach agents, for example reducing long sentences, and encouraging them to speak at a clear and understandable pace, all of which improves the agent/customer interaction.

Sentiment Analysis

AI Companion presents the current sentiment of the engagement, to help agents de-escalate the customer. The sentiment rating updates throughout the course of the engagement, encouraging agents to work towards a positive outcome for the customer.

Follow-Up Actions

AI Companion enables agents to generate a list of next steps/actions based on the context and content of the conversation with the customer. This reduces the length of time agents spend in wrap-up, and reduces the administration requirements for each contact. It also improves the quality and conciseness of logged follow-up actions, eliminating human error.

But now it gets even better!

Why? Because Zoom has also now fully launched its latest generative AI feature - AI Expert Assist - in Zoom Contact Center.

We saw Expert Assist demonstrated for the first time in San Jose at Zoomtopia 2023 and liked what we saw. We also previewed a live customer demo of the technology (pre-launch) at our Zoom CXperience event at Zoom HQ in October 2023, and it went down very well. Attendees were impressed with the speed and accuracy of the call transcription, and also the fact that it is capable of correcting itself as more context is gathered. The same technology is also utilised for Zoom's Quality Management (but that's for another article).

What does AI Expert Assist bring to Zoom Contact Center?

Zoom Expert Assist offers several additional AI-powered capabilities to help your customer service agents streamline the experiences they provide, every time. Enabling faster handling times, better quality resolutions, and reduced post-contact administration:

Wrap-up Summary

Zoom Expert Assist can auto-generate a concise and accurate summary of the interaction with the customer, eliminating the need for an agent to take notes manually. This keeps agents focused on the matter at hand when dealing with an interaction, and significantly reduces post-contact administration. In turn, this helps to reduce queuing times, and makes life a little easier for your service agents, too.

Knowledge Base (KB) Retrieval

Expert Assist evaluates the customer's intent and context of the conversation, and then automatically shows the relevant knowledge base article to the agent, whilst they are interacting with the customer. This helps to speed up agent training and onboarding time, whilst ensuring a better quality, and faster experience for the customer. Agents can also search for knowledge base content directly from the Zoom Contact Center interface.

Information Retrieval

Expert Assist also enables agents to pull information from 3rd party systems, at the right time, based on the intent of the customer. This might be from a CRM, eCommerce system, ERP, Data Lake, Service Desk, allowing agents to quickly service enquiries, reducing handling times and providing a much improved experience for customers.

Zoom Expert Assist also works in conjunction with Zoom Virtual Agent. Customers who leverage both Zoom Contact Center and Zoom Virtual Agent will have much happier (and less busy) system admins and content creators, because all knowledge base and FAQ content - both customer-facing and agent-facing - can be managed from the same administration page! This removes duplication of effort when managing knowledge and training content, and enables more focus on improving the quality and effectiveness of those articles, from a single source of truth.

Why is Zoom leading in this space, right now?

The answer to this is quite simple: When it comes to taking the right approach to AI in a contact centre or customer service environment, it appears that Zoom has really thought it through.

Whilst other providers are hastily bolting-on AI functionality in an attempt to keep pace with market trends, Zoom has designed and deployed its AI services in a meaningful and impactful way that genuinely adds value, reduces wasted time, improves the customer and agent experience, and maximises customer service efficiency.

Because ultimately, that’s what AI should be doing for us all… making our lives easier! Your customer service agents need access to the right information and intelligence at the right time, and that's exactly what Zoom has delivered in Zoom Contact Center.

With AI Companion Zoom has also democratised contact centre AI. The functionality is included with every Zoom Contact Center license tier, meaning that even with the lowest cost license, agents get the benefit of AI Companion. When compared with other CCaaS providers, which are generally asking for an additional $20-$30 per seat for this capability, Zoom is bucking the trend by focusing purely on delivering the best contact centre product for the job.

Watch a brief, end-to-end demo of Zoom AI Companion & AI Expert Assist working together to help a customer service agent resolve a customer complaint quickly and efficiently.

About Acceleraate

Acceleraate is a Zoom Solution Partner, Zoom Authorised Reseller, and the first Zoom partner to achieve the Zoom Customer Experience (ZCX) Competency certification. We are CX and Customer Contact optimisation experts and specialise in solving problems by uniting cloud technology with smart and straightforward thinking. We focus on helping businesses reduce effort, improve loyalty, and maximise cost efficiency.

With over two decades of hands-on experience designing, implementing, and managing cloud contact centres and AI solutions for some of the UK's best-known businesses and brands, Acceleraate delivers CX strategy, implementation, system integration, optimisation, and modern managed services for business.