From video conferencing to CX excellence: Zoom's EMEA CX SE Leader

In the latest episode of MYC'D UP with Tech Leaders, MyCustomer speaks with Iqbal Javaid from Zoom. Iqbal, heading up Zoom's CX solution engineering team for EMEA, shares insights into the evolving landscape of customer service, particularly within the context of Zoom's contact centre platform.

During the conversation, Iqbal provides an overview of Zoom's transformation from a video conferencing platform to a comprehensive customer experience solution. He delves into the integration of artificial intelligence, underscoring Zoom's commitment to enhancing both customer and employee experiences.

Iqbal goes on to discuss the impact of AI on customer experience, shedding light on Zoom's features, such as the virtual agent and Expert Assist. He emphasises how AI acts as a valuable complement to human agents, offering real-time support and elevating overall service quality.

State of CX: Learn more about how leading European companies are reshaping customer experiences here. 

Where we're seeing a lot of success with our customers, is where the AI is able to tap into your knowledge and feed the agent with information that's relevant to what's being discussed in real-time. 

You can read the full transcript below or listen to the episode now. 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Sabine Groven

Firstly, I want to say, Iqbal, welcome to the MYC'D UP with Tech Leaders podcast.

Iqbal Javaid 

Thank you, Sabine; it is a pleasure to be here with you today.

Sabine Groven

It's great to have you. And I thought, for the benefit of our listeners, could you give us a little bit of an introduction to yourself? So, a bit about your background and your current role.

Iqbal Javaid

Sure. My name is Iqbal Javaid, and I head up Zoom's customer experience solution engineering team covering EMEA. So that's Europe, the Middle East and Africa. And I've been with the business now for two years. Customer experience, in general, is quite close to my heart. When I graduated back in 2001, my first job was to work in a call centre.

And ever since, I've been involved across customer experience in some shape or another, whether from a technological standpoint, working either as an analyst and now obviously building our team, they're actually supporting our customers build out their customer experience technology.

Sabine Groven

Great. And Iqbal, we know Zoom for meetings and video calls. So, can you give us an introduction to Zoom Contact Center? What is it, and how does it work?

Iqbal Javaid 

Yeah, it's an interesting question. We get asked quite a lot: why is Zoom talking about a contact centre? What do we know about the contact centre? The fact is we've really developed our platform over the last few years since the success of what we achieved with our Zoom video conferencing platform. We've really kind of evolved that first into developing our employee experience capability and, so, being able to collaborate through team chat, phone services, whiteboarding, and everything else you need to be able to collaborate that's been built to enhance that employee experience. And whilst we've been doing that, we've also been developing our ability to deliver great customer experiences. We started off that journey by providing services like webinars and events and a very sophisticated events platform to be able to reach a larger audience externally. And that was our first, I guess a view of what it looks like to be able to deliver a customer experience type of solution. Since then, we've evolved it further by introducing our own Zoom Contact Center platform, which is actually made up of our Zoom customer experience portfolio, which includes the contact centre platform, workforce management, workforce engagement, and quality management.

And our own Zoom Virtual Agent, which is a conversational AI which we'll go into in a minute. But you kind of get a sense now of actually, we're doing so much more than just video conferencing. We've really expanded the platform to do so much more. And customer experience for us is a hugely big growth area for Zoom in the coming years.

Sabine Groven

Yeah, so you mentioned a little bit then, but I want to hear about the impact of artificial intelligence on customer experience in general and how this can enhance the human touch in customer interactions or, if it can at all. So, is that something that you can speak on?

Iqbal Javaid 

Yeah, absolutely. AI has become obviously a huge thing for everybody. It's more than just a buzzword. To be honest, Zoom has deployed AI as part of everything that we've built as part of our platform. It's pretty much the fabric of what we do when it comes to delivering all the capabilities. But from a customer experience perspective, I think we're now starting to really see some tangible benefits for the end consumer.

And for the organisations that are running their contact centre environments. And they're leveraging AI in lots of different ways. Just a couple of examples, as I mentioned earlier on, we've got something called Zoom virtual agent, which is a conversational AI chatbot engine. And we can enable our customers to enable a digital engagement through web chat or maybe social media and use Zoom virtual agent and the AI engine to plug into their CRM, their knowledge base, to be able to provide a bit of a self-service to the end consumer. So we're now able to deliver that today. So that's kind of enhancing the end consumer experience that actually many of us are familiar with, right? You know, as consumers, we're used to speaking with chatbots, and we expect them to be better at servicing us and our needs. But actually, when we really need to speak to a human being, which is more often than not, then how can we ensure that human is able to deliver the best possible service to us as a consumer? And this is where AI comes in for us. We've got a solution called Expert Assist, which basically you have the AI supporting the customer service agent in real-time. So the AI is listening in on what the customer's saying, what the agent's saying, and the AI is coaching the agent in terms of actually maybe you're speaking too fast, maybe you're not listening enough.

They are giving you a sentiment analysis of actually how the customer's feeling based on what they're saying. So the agent is aware of what's happening, and maybe a step further, we can offer that capability to the supervisor too so that the supervisor can see the agent perhaps isn't performing as well or actually they're performing quite well. That's one aspect of it. I think the key element.

Where we're seeing a lot of success with our customers is where the AI is able to tap into your knowledge and feed the agent with information that's relevant to what's being discussed again in real-time. And this is where we really truly see how AI is complementing the whole customer experience for the end consumer and also the agent who's servicing that customer as well. So look, we're quite early on in our journey, and we're still evolving.

We're working with our customers, but ultimately, we're seeing the huge impact that AI is already having in this space for us and our customers.

Sabine Groven

So, a large part of it is about empowering agents, then.

Iqbal Javaid

I think so, yeah. It's definitely the case, right? You know, this has been going on for many years, right? It's always been about how we can provide the agent with all the relevant information to be able to do that first call resolution, right? You know, you don't want customers calling back. You don't want to be calling the customer back, either. How can we ensure that the agent has access to all the information and has the power to be able to resolve that customer's issue?

We are working very hard to ensure that it can be delivered either through AI or also ensuring that the agent has the right information at the right time as well.

Sabine Groven

Yes, and you mentioned employee experience and of course, empowerment and tools and improving those kinds of interactions would be a part of that. But could you talk a bit more about bridging the gap in delivering better employee experience and then, therefore, delivering better customer experiences?

Iqbal Javaid 

I think this is a huge ask for many customers; historically, in the world of customer service, customer experience has very much been a siloed role within a business where the back office and the front office have been pretty disparate, not just because of process, but also technology, that there's not been really a collaboration between the back end and the front end.

So that's kind of one aspect of employee experience that we consider is how can we bring an organisation together by providing the tools to be able to collaborate. An example of this I can give you is when you have your frontline worker who's supporting a customer as a customer service agent. They are able to support the customer as much as they can, but perhaps they need to engage with somebody internally in the back office to get an answer for something, you know.

Usually, they may need to reach them over email or maybe collaborate across a different platform. We've made it quite easy because of our unified approach to being able to provide all of what you need as an agent in one platform. You can, in real-time, communicate with anybody internally to get the answers you need, maybe even transfer a conversation from a front-end agent to a back.

That's kind of, for me, that's bridging the gap between what we can do from an employee and a customer experience perspective. But I think, more importantly, what we're doing is that with the tools and the platform we offer, we can offer a consistent experience for everybody. The second element of this question, I think what is important to know, is how can we ensure that frontline agent customer service analyst or customer service representative is getting the best possible employee experience, and I think this is a big part of many contact centres out there that don't want to reduce churn. First of all, that's the biggest issue working in the contact centre myself, the number of people coming and going is quite ridiculous because it's never seen as a career move, but that's because one element of it is there's not much job satisfaction.

And you don't really get to experience the company culture or anything else as such because all you're doing is focusing on just answering calls and just dealing with customers. But what we've done is, in recent times, we've introduced an employee engagement platform through an acquisition of WorkFeeVo. And what that means is that every employee in the business has access to all of the information they need. We can do things like training, we can do things like gamification to reward agents as well, potentially to drive up that employee experience kind of. Analysts and industry specialists will tell you if you can get the employee experience right, then you're halfway there in terms of being able to deliver a great customer experience. And I think that first part is something that's gone missing from many organisations, but there is now a drive to resolve that.

Sabine Groven

Yeah, it's a real shame to see how many people leave their jobs in a contact centre and don't have the kind of job satisfaction that you spoke about. I know that there is a conversation around AI in terms of improving that, and a lot of organisations are talking about working smarter, not harder, but at the same time, we are seeing a lot of organisations letting go of a lot of their support staff.

Iqbal Javaid 

Yeah, I say it's an interesting point, and it is something that I think as we, I believe we're going through a bit of a huge shift and change in this industry, and AI is contributing to this massive change. One of the things that gets mentioned a lot is many of the job functions that used to exist that exist today will become irrelevant in the future because AI will essentially take over.

There was a statistic I recently heard where, you know, somebody mentioned that in 10 years, ten years from now, organisations will no longer need an agent to service customers. It's all going to be done by AI. So, what happens to all of those jobs? What happens to all the people that are doing these contacts into jobs today? And my, I guess, perspective on this is today, AI is complimenting.

The agent delivers a better service to the consumer. So the way I see it going is humans and AI are really the only way to deliver the best possible service, particularly when it comes to, as an end consumer, when we want to get our problems resolved, we do still crave that human interaction. So I think that's something that will never go away. But what AI does is it allows those...

Organisations to upskill people to offer more value to their consumers. So imagine this: you, as an agent, are no longer trying to resolve consumer issues, but you're really trying to upsell and drive more revenues because you're not spending time trying to fix problems. After all, the AI has done that. The AI has fixed all the problems and resolved this issue. So

Your role as an agent then becomes actually how we can drive more value to the consumer. Maybe we can use AI to detect what could be coming, like a renewal of a service, and we can use that time to do that. So, I think organisations need to get smarter with human beings to skill them in an area that allows them to ultimately drive more revenues for them and deliver, of course, a better service to their customers. So I think that's the short to midterm game, who knows what the future holds, but I think that's definitely the immediate games that we are seeing today.

Sabine Groven

Yeah. And sometimes you are just absolutely desperate to speak with a human, right? For the reassurance and then having a kind of intelligent, bot-to-agent handover where the agent is empowered, as you say, and they know what the conversation has been. Perhaps they know a bit about how the customer is feeling, which improves both the agents and the customer's experience.

Iqbal Javaid 

No, absolutely. 100% I agree with that. And I think that's what we're kind of driving towards now. And I know we're also going to touch on video in a second as well. And that can really take that the level of service to that next step further.

Sabine Groven

Yeah, that is a really interesting offering, actually. A way that technology can enhance the human touch is through video, which Zoom is known for, of course, video. So, what would you say the role of video in modern contact centres is today?

Iqbal Javaid 

It's an interesting one. A lot of organisations that we, when we started this out 20 months ago, by the way, we kind of led with video because it just made sense. Right. It's our heritage. But actually, we really thought about what that video experience should look like. You know, we wanted to deliver a seamless experience. And what I mean by seamless is, as a consumer, maybe you initiate engagement via web chat. Maybe you call in initially, whatever; however you do that, the transition to video should then be seamless. And that's exactly what we've done.

So regardless of which channel you come in on, we can escalate to video within one or two clicks, making it very easy for the consumer and also the agent. So that's kind of number one. We wanted to make it simple because that's what Zoom is about. That's why we've been so successful: because we're simple and easy to use. And we wanted to maintain that within the customer experience world. And once we've achieved that, what we noticed actually, there was quite a lot of pushback initially.

From organisations to say, you know, we don't need video and contact centre. Our agents, they don't want to be seen. They're either working from home now, you know, they don't want to be showing the messy backgrounds and things like that. So there was an initial reluctance, but I think what we've worked out over the last year or so is there are certain types of services you can offer that really enhance what you're offering the customer. And we touched on that human interaction, that definitely, we know, a face-to-face engagement enhances that. And what it tends to do is you're able to offer things like empathy better because you're seeing how the customers react to what you're saying. It isn't easy to see the tangible benefits of this, but actually, the customer is feeling better because they're getting more value out of the service that their organisation is offering them. But ultimately, where we see it working is during those high-touch engagements. So, you know, if you have to spend a lot of time speaking to somebody on the phone, it can be quite difficult. Perhaps it makes sense to do it over video or maybe the type of service. Maybe you're applying for a mortgage, and you're running through an application form. It would be great to be able to speak with your mortgage broker face to face, and actually, maybe they can even guide you through the application. So we do. We have something called...

It's basically co-browsing, so you can see what the consumer is doing while you're speaking to them over video. So it's just like a meeting, really, the way we know it. But you're not asking the customer to schedule the meeting or join from this link. It just transitions very nicely to video, and then you can continue with that conversation. So I think there's a lot of benefits to be had. We're still in the very early days of convincing customers to adopt video.

But we are now starting to see this in retail; we're seeing it in healthcare and financial services already. So the adoption's been very good, and they're seeing the benefits of it already.

Sabine Groven

Yeah, I can imagine for something like financial services, that would be very handy because it is so reassuring. You don't want to get anything wrong. The language in those kinds of, for example, mortgage applications can be very confusing. So to have someone go through that with you, yeah, that's good service, I think.

Iqbal Javaid 

Yeah, exactly. And yet financial services, and we're seeing it in places like retail banking, for instance, retail stores, where actually you can interact with a video screen if there's not enough staff or resources physically installed to be able to get through to a specialist for help. I think we're seeing huge digitisation across the retail.

Where, you know, even paying for your items is all self-service, but if you get stuck on something, it'd be great to have somebody just pop up in the video and just sort out whatever support that you need at that given time so I think these things are starting to become more natural. I think with the new generation they are very familiar with the video experience already. They're used to working in this way, so I think we are, as I said, it's early days. Still, I do believe that it's definitely true.

This will become more readily available, and we'll see more organisations adopting this.

Sabine Groven

Yeah, also, if you are a little bit grumpy and the chatbot hasn't delivered what you wanted and then all of a sudden you've got a human there in front of you on video, I think you're going to be a little bit kinder towards them then because that is an actual human you're interacting with, and you can see that they are trying to help you.

Iqbal Javaid 

Yeah, definitely. And that's definitely something that we're seeing a lot of organisations trying to find ways to deliver empathy, almost, and almost trying to work out who within their contact centre environment can deliver better empathy than others. Like they're trying to measure this, and they're trying to build skills based on who can offer a little bit better empathy.

Then others, so if you do have an irate customer who's actually already quite angry and you've got AI who's kind of detected the sentiments actually pretty negative, then perhaps it makes sense to route this to somebody who has actually got a history of delivering better empathy. And, of course, video helps with that, but maybe a video at the time isn't the right thing. But you have an individual who, like I said, is recognised as somebody who's done a good job of delivering a bit of empathy as part of resolving that customer's issue? It's kind of where we're seeing things go, how we can use technology and the human touch to kind of really try and solve those types of problems and try and bring those customers around because we've all been angry customers at some point and sometimes all we need is a good communicator who can try and help us resolve our issue.

And then you can turn a very, very negative customer experience into a very positive one.

Sabine Groven

So, measuring empathy would be done through kind of video recordings? Is that a metric that managers can see in the system? How would they go about that?

Iqbal Javaid

Yeah, so we've got a module called quality management, and what that does is it can analyse the agent's performance, and you can set criteria and scorecards for those agents, and you can start to build a bit of a profile for those agents, and then that data can then help you to build skills within your platform, and you can have agents who have got, as I said, a record of performing quite well.

With agents who deliver a very positive sentiment to their customers. And you can start to build a profile of these, but you can quickly group agents in this way. And I think what it also does is it helps the agents to see how they can improve, and you can coach the agents to actually what you really want to do is everybody in the organisation should be able to deliver the same level of empathy. That's what you're striving for. And everybody should know that being able to measure it in this way can help not just the supervisor or the ones that are managing them but also give the agents a bit of self-awareness as to actually, these are the areas I know I need to improve; I can see that when I'm speaking to customers that the sentiment isn't always positive, why is that? Maybe there's something I'm saying, maybe this is the way that I'm responding, but you can very easily go to that part so that conversation and kind of examine what's happened.

What words have been used, and what's going on in that conversation? And like I said, it's all about ultimately it's there to help improve the performance of the agent.

Sabine Groven

Yeah, and as you said, you could then use the agents that score highest on empathy or have proven that before to have that kind of interaction, and they would probably enjoy it more as well. If that's something that they are good at and they are empathetic people, then that kind of conversation would probably be more satisfactory for them.

Iqbal Javaid

Yeah, it's a good point. You're right, and it could be. On the other hand, they could end up with all the difficult customers because they deliver such good empathy. So there is; you've got to balance it off a little bit because I can see it working the other way. There's only so much empathy you can offer. Yeah.

Sabine Groven

Exactly. Your reward for being super nice is having to be super nice to more very difficult people.

Iqbal Javaid

Yeah, yeah, so I can see the dangers of that as well.

Sabine Groven

Yeah, I guess that's when good management and delegation come in.

Iqbal Javaid

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Sabine Groven

So, Iqbal, I have one question for you before we wrap up. And this is a question that we ask everyone appearing on the Miked Up With Tech Leaders podcast. So, if there was one particular tool, solution, or product type that you think businesses should invest in but isn't currently provided by your organisation, what would it be and why?

Iqbal Javaid 

It's a great question. And when it comes to tools and technology today, there's so much choice, there's so much out there. So anything I say, somebody out there will probably think, actually, there is something like this already that's available. But the reality is, whilst the technology may be there, the execution of it perhaps isn't. And...

When you look at the latest trends at the moment, you see that customer experience is kind of on a decline. When you look at some of the analysts that speak today, when they compare where we are today to perhaps where we were a few years ago, it's quite disappointing actually that we're seeing a bit of a downward trend where this is based on NPS scores and CSATs that organisations are doing. In general, generally speaking, we're not seeing that...

Even though the technology is improved, we can see it right. We're talking today about how AI can complement this. So, I think execution is definitely one thing, but how do we do that? One of the things that many of the CX leaders that I speak with are Really driving towards being able to build what they call a single view of the customer. Everybody's striving towards that; nobody's really cracked this code because in many instances, as an agent, you're accessing information from all sorts of different places, and it takes much longer to handle that call. The average handling time you want to decrease, you want to do first-time resolution for your customers. And whilst you're striving towards that, it isn't easy when you have lots of information all over the place. And I think it'd be great to have a tool today.

That allows you to do it. And like I said, there will be companies out there. There will be people out there saying, oh yes, we can do this, but actually, nobody's been able to really do this well enough. And it's certainly an area of focus for us at Zoom. How can we help deliver that? As I said, that single view of the customer, but the single view of the customer based on the intent of the customer, based on what's being discussed in real-time, that's where it becomes relevant. Because if you have

We've got ways today of being able to see a customer's profile within a CRM as they're calling; we can automate this. But what we can't, what we haven't been able to see is if a customer mentioned something, oh, I'm interested in this, or I need this, or can you help me solve this? How can we present the customer's personalised data and information to the agent in real-time to be able to service that customer a lot quicker? So.

I think we're not quite there yet, but I truly believe that this will help bring that trend back up again, where we can start to really see better customer experience being delivered to the end consumer. I hope that answers the question. I know it's not a tool per se, but I think it's certainly a gap that we see CX leaders talk about quite a lot.

Sabine Groven

An interesting perspective and yeah, some hope for the future then of being able to offer that.

Iqbal Javaid 

100%.

Sabine Groven

Well, thank you so much, Iqbal. It was great speaking with you. Thank you very much for joining me on the podcast.

Iqbal Javaid 

Thank you, Sabine, for having me; it's been a pleasure speaking to you.