The ActivateCX Podcast
Join Frank Rogers on The ActivateCX™ Podcast, your resource for demystifying, clarifying, and providing guidance around AI, CXM, and the modern Cloud Contact Center.
In this Podcast series, Frank interviews Thought Leaders, Unpacks critical AI & CX technology, and addresses the leading Experience topics of the day.
#cx #customerexperience #ai #ex #cxm #contactcenter #salesstrategy
The ActivateCX Podcast
The Next Big Thing in Contact Centers will Surprise You
https://activateCX.arroyo360.com/zoom
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Join us as we explore Zoom's journey from virtual meetings to ai contact center solutions with Industry Icon Brandon Knight! Discover how Zoom rose to fame during the pandemic and where they are headed next. Don't forget to subscribe for more tech updates!
Brandon, welcome to the show Frank. Thanks for having me, man. I'm looking forward to this. Well, let's jump right into it. Zoom is known for virtual meetings. In fact, they took over for Webex, almost erasing that name during the pandemic. And as a result, kind of blew up as an organization. And now you've got this contact center offering. That's somewhat new. What does that investment look like to zoom? Where the heck are you going with this? A similar question was asked of, of Eric a year and a half back. Where does he see zoom going and why are they in their space? And I'm being honest with you. The answer surprised me a little bit and I work here. But he said within three to five years, he wanted zoom to be known as a CX leader. And that's a big statement from a company that is known. I mean, Not not to toot our own horn, but like you said, post pandemic, these are known as zoom meetings. Now, what I mean? It's, a verb. So to say that you want to be known as a CX company, a CX leader I think it says a lot about his approach. The investment has been there from a people perspective, from a technology perspective. I was talking to a customer yesterday because our release notes are available and we're doing between 20 and 30 feature releases a month and we've been running at that rate for about 14, 15 months right now. So we're, we are going to be a leader in this space. Your competitors have 10, 15 years in the space, across the board, not everybody, but for the most part, the leaders that you see out there sit with that type of tenure. You've been in this space for about two to three years. Is that investment essentially a function of catching up, or do you feel like you're getting into a state right now where you're actually driving innovation? I'm glad you added that second part because I don't want to offend any of our competitors, but in some cases, and it clearly has worked for us when you're talking technology in the cloud later is better just because we're created in the cloud purely. But we've also had the benefit of seeing what some of the players are doing well, but also seeing what some of the pain points that still existed in customers. I want to answer this because I get this question a lot how do you compare? From a feature functionality set. And I always say this, we have no intention of being on feature parity with any of the players that have been out there for 10, 15 years. That is, that is not our goal. We do a really good job of getting information feedback from our customers and getting feedback from experts in the field, like yourself to know, we don't want to build what already exists. We want to build what customers are actually asking for and what they want. And I will tell you one thing that drives us. It has been driving us from the beginning is that we started looking at some of the data out there from Forrester and from Gartner on utilization. So we weren't looking to match features. We were looking to see what features. Our customers actually using that exists and what features the customers want that didn't exist. So our path is decidedly different. I think that's pretty mature. I mean, if you look at an Excel spreadsheet, just as an example, there are hundreds of functions and thousands of different types of things that people have done to create really cool data analytics and data management. But on average, most people use three. And so creating all of that feature parity to maybe address 3 percent of the marketplace makes no sense whatsoever. I've been a fan of yours, you're kind of a legend in the industry. You moving into zoom and to become for lack of a better word, kind of the CX czar of that company actually has a lot of gravity. What drew you to the organization? What caused you to pivot and walk into an organization that essentially is certainly a leader in one category, but is really an upstart in the category that expertise. So very much an upstart, which is, which is actually one of the things that drew me to it. I will tell you the specific catalyst is two things. One was the failed attempt to acquire Five9 that's public knowledge. When that did not go zoom announced that they their own, that intrigued I've been an observer and operator in this space for a long time, someone with the chutzpah of Zoom, right? It's a big brand, big backing to say that we're going to build something in this space intrigued me, and it caused me to have a conversation with a couple of the leaders back when they were doing it. And then to be honest, cause one of the partners that I work with told me I had to kind of put my money where my mouth was because going around speaking for years on the content center space and what would change. I was going to ask like, what's next? What would change? And what do we have to do? I always said that if zoom, Microsoft salesforce, or Oracle, those were my four, I said, if they ever got serious. About the contact center of the industry. They could change the entire landscape., I always view those, those four companies that I mentioned as, you don't have to teach anybody who they are because the brand. You don't have to worry about their financial back, you don't have to worry about them being bought by another company, or being acquired and, going out of business right after you start going with them ? Cause business is not, it's not private stuff. So when Zoom announced that one of the partners I worked with, he said, so what are you going to do now? Like, this is one of the guys you told us could change the whole thing. And I said, you know what? You're right. So I gotta go help them do it. I mean, I said they could do it. I gotta go help them do it. It does speak to the power. Like you talk about those major brands out there that are absolutely flush with cash. That's really, that's what we're talking about. They have the resources to invest significantly and cover ground quickly. And they have the technological prowess to create a solution. You're part and parcel of that over overall team that's Creating a CX solution. What is your design North star? What is it that's driving you to a point where we're in that magic quadrant, so to speak with the known people, like the Genesis, the nice CXOne, the RingCentral, all these people, the Five9's, they're all essentially known brands inside the contact center world. And how does zoom get there? How does that design philosophy support that? Yeah, I think the design philosophy kind of goes back to one of the things that drew me here that I was talking about before, Zoom started even before I got here, Zoom started with their product design by looking at what their, what customer said was missing. And what they were actually using first. So the roadmap, when I, when I came into the door, I looked at the roadmap. It was highly utilized feature sets. And there's a chart, there's a standard chart, whether you follow Gartner or somebody else, there's a standard chart of what features are utilized the most, what customers are asking for that they don't have. So that, that was really our initial. Map, right? Our initial initial target. And if you consider the top two to three players in the cloud space, the apex for us is as about 77%, when it went, and this is, I'm going to go before we started, major into AI and stuff like that, the standard feature set look for us was if we got to about 75 to 77 percent of what they had that seemed to be where we were at the peak of what customers were asking for before things started dropping off, like you said, where you end up investing in a feature that 3 percent of people were using, or two customers were using that kind of thing. So that's still kind of our guiding thing. We're quickly approaching it and I know everyone says that, but I will tell you one of the reasons that we have gotten where we are so quickly. And in my opinion, when it comes to incorporating the newer things, the innovative things like AI and stuff will will surpass the competition is because we're primarily developers at heart. And I think a lot of companies take on the persona of their leader and zoom is no different. Eric is basically a developer. I mean, yes, he's the CEO, the founder of a major company, but he's a developer. And one of the things that he uses to drive all of us is. What can you make that will make the customer happy? And, I know that sounds corny, but literally if you come into, you go into our offices, happiness is painted on the wall, it's in the hallways, it's a driving thing. And, it's where he started. He started with the, he felt the company, the product of the company where he was. Customers weren't happy with it. They were complaining all the time. He wanted to make something better. That's how he did this. That's why he came up with zoom meetings, and that's how he has driven every product that he's added to the platform after that. So, for us, innovation is not a buzzword. It's not like we want our technology to be cool. We want to sound trendy. It's a must. It literally drives everything we do. If you think about, the Omnichannel approach, which I think is table stakes now, for the most part in the contact center world, and it's really the core, I think of it as like a the foundation is how many channels, what can you be on where you can meet your customer where they are? If you look at your philosophy to that is that a single pane of glass approach? 100%. And to be fair, we had an advantage when it, when it came to that, because you talk about, the other contact center companies, their version of Omnichannel is, well, I'm, I'm going to put the ACD and the contact center stuff together. And I'll, hopefully add email maybe some chat, web stuff like that, but that's still, that's their version of Omnichannel. But then the agent and all the other employees in the company are still using six other systems. To view customer data or to have a meeting or to chat internally. We had an advantage of course, because we already have a platform that has the most used meeting software already in it, it has chat already in it as, as all the, all those things in it. So then when we added phone, we put it in the same application. When we added context in our workforce, magic AI, it's all the same thing. So now we're talking agents that have 13 different applications, back office, not even agents, people, regular office, people who need a telephone, but who also want to look at notes, maybe from an agent call, or who also want to have a meeting with someone who's not in that building. So, a single pane of glass for us is truly. The zoom application, which I gotta say because of COVID, even a five year old can use now, so we're not, the user adoption is through the roof but we did have an advantage of that. Well, if you've ever seen a five year old and an iPad, I don't know if that's dumbing down the situation because they're pretty amazing we know the world is really run by FUD, right? Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. That's how you drive people away from something that you don't want them to pay attention to. And so there's some misconceptions out there in the industry, potentially around zoom, that as an organization, you're looking to counter. How do you actively dispel some of these myths about what zoom is getting into and how you're approaching it? Yeah, I think some of the some of the obvious things when we came out, it was like, well, that zoom it's, new. It's going to be an S M B product or, you can't, it's not really going to have all the features and you get, you really gotta be careful because those guys do meetings, we do one thing. So clearly we must do it better. Which is, which is silly, but like you said, it's one of the things that was out there. One of the funniest ones for me cause I was actually at a panel and someone raised their hand. I was like, well, you guys are new to, I mean, you did, you did meetings and stuff, but, voice is a completely different thing. And how do you think you're going to be an expert in, in voice and voice traffic and security of it and all those things. And I said, I don't, I don't want you to feel bad, but I got to ask you a question. I mean, you've been using the zoom meetings project for over 10 years. Yeah. And everyone used it during the pandemic and for us. Well, were you, were you using like mine or like, were you talking, it's the same voice platform that you've been using in our meetings project for the last 10 plus years. So we're not new to voice? So, so some of those things Putting those to bed has been, has been kind of funny. But we are here, and we're not, we're not going anywhere where we're going to get better. We're growing. And even for some of the people that said, well, you guys try to acquire Five9, that can go through, what's going to happen next, the, financial, I said, well, even if you look at that, we were the parent, we were the purchaser? So we're not, we're not in this, I'm just being honest. We're not in a situation where someone's going to come along and buy Zoom. if there's any acquisitions or anything like that and which I have no, no privy information to, by the way, I don't want anybody running out and, making any financial decisions, I don't know anything about that stuff. Yeah. This is not an insider call. Exactly. No, it's not that, but, but I will say, given our financial position and our desire to be a leader in this space we would be doing the acquiring. So you talked a little bit about AI. Obviously that's on. The tip of everybody's tongue in terms of just business period. But inside the contact center, everybody has their AI talk track. But it's a lot of times it's specific generalities in which people are unpacking this for people. But we know that typically there's an AI that can be applied to Some sort of like real time support for the agent, or we could use it as a voice bot or a chat bot. So you're integrating it into various touch points, whether it's into the call flow or it's on a website, all these types of things. And we're using AI for analytics , when zoom is talking about aI, what is that AI methodology that you're applying? Where do you see that going? How are you applying it today? But what does that look like roadmap for the next six months? And then also maybe you could talk a little bit about some of the plug and play technologies like a Balto or something like that, that would natively just fit inside right now so that you can turn on really advanced features from the get. I agree. And I think Table stakes, like you said things that we're doing now, of course we have the virtual agent. chat bots, I own the front end that a lot of companies are providing. We do have the Agent assist, the access and the knowledge base and learning from information in previous calls to assist the Agent on the back end as well. So those are the things that are available right now. I'll tell you a couple of things that are available right now that I think a new age that lead to where we, where we're going is we are noticing that while the front end tools are useful for self service improving the knowledge and speed and efficiency of the agent. Seems to be bringing a, a, a, I don't want to say bigger is better or better ROI a return for the whole customer experience because getting, getting to the call quickly, getting the call to the right person is one thing, but then making that agent have all the information they need available to them. And maybe even some information they didn't know they needed. Because the AI figured it out faster than they did. Don't want to make anybody nervous, but it thinks faster. It compiles data faster. Okay. And and we're seeing that and then on the management of the actual data and of the agent things like, when I was coming up as a supervisor. If I listen to one call on an agent per month and gave them a quality score, that was, that was a lot. And in some instances, that, that was the goal. And we know that's no indication of the level of service that agent is providing. So utilizing our AI and our, and our WM product to listen to all of the calls, score them. If you, if you want, we have preset, things that you can score all the calls. You can listen, of course, for certain words, phrases, compliance things, regulatory things, but a live person isn't doing it, the AI is doing it, and instead of doing it after the fact, saying, hey, you forgot to give that, you know, compliance statement yesterday, the AI can listen, realize the call is coming to a close and you haven't done it, and tell the agent in real time, hey, you got it. Here's a statement. And then, of course, what happened on the call is important. We know agents and human beings. We know if you have a, if you have a list of more than 10 disposition codes, they're using the 1st 3, they're going to, they're going to overuse other and miscellaneous. We know that 10 agents can take the same call and you're going to get 8 different notes on what happened on that phone call. Right? Those are real things. Having an A. I summarize the call removes all of that. It moves all the subjectivity. It's an objective account of what actually happened. It chooses the right resolution based on the information that it has gathered and it also gets that agent. Now, the agent is not typing 15 minutes after a call. They're on to the next call. Because the system put the notes in and the disposition code in. So we think those things are going to be more impactful. Helping the agent, helping the actual operation, the business of the contact center is where we're going. I don't know if you remember the movie, The Last Samurai, but Ben Watanabe was the samurai and he always just loved having a great conversation. Yeah. No matter what that was about. That was a great conversation. The contact center is a singular opportunity while you're at the intersection of people to have a great conversation and to resolve whatever issue or help the person do whatever they need to do, which could be make a reservation. It could be on the revenue side of the business as well, which I think people often forget. They think customer service, customer support only. But I say that ultimately when we're talking about agent assist, this should be. All engines forward into the sales part of the organization as well, right? Yes, absolutely. You want to be upselling, you want to recognize the value of the person you're talking to. I think one of the best things that has happened outside of the contact center is the impact of loyalty programs on our industry, on the retail industry, when you walk into a hotel that, that you are a member of or you are one of the statuses on the airlines. I mean, those things have skyrocketed. So that data, people want to be recognized for who they are. They want the personalization. So we're going beyond just. Satisfying the customer need now and that personalization can help you upsell. And I did want to touch on one thing one part of your last question. We, of course, do have integrations. We recognize that one of the best ways to make it less painful than a rip and replace for an organization is to have integrations with some of the existing software applications they may have. So when you're talking, Balto and observe AI and yellow AI and assembled, and then all the workforce management, Verint, nice, all those guys. We play very well with them. We even have a marketplace where you can actually go onto our site and see who the players are, see who we've integrated with. We work well with them that's a part of in my opinion, helping a customer get to the technology they want faster with and reducing the pain by allowing us to do it in a modular way. Yeah, I think that's important. And there's some interesting bi-products to, as well from doing a lot of the approaches to employee experience. I like to say there's that, term that people use in the wild. It says, happy wife, happy life. And it's really true that , a happy agent will create a happy customer and you're going to keep that agent, that salesperson, that customer service person, because they're having a better experience. They're actually armed now to have a better conversation and the consistency across the entire team, ultimately, from a financial perspective, if you think about the wages that you pay out for a group of people that are customer facing for the most part, that's a sunk cost. And also at the same time, it's a fixed cost. It's really not a variable cost at all. And so if you think about adding some of these features, you have a group of people, let's say, for example, you have a rep that's being paid at a base level, 5, 000, 6, 000 a month. And then you're going to add something on top of that. We'll just say that it's a hundred dollars or 200 a month, right? Okay. Lift, but that human being increases their productivity by 15 percent or 20%. Hey, that moves the top line that lifts the bottom line. Fundamentally, when I talk about, the wage being a sunk cost is if you were to think about it, like I'm paying out this money. Already right now, if I was to drop another 150 on the table to get this extra amount of lift, would you do it? I think the answer would be yes and all day long. Yes. Yeah. You know what? I want to turn the tables with this. I want to, I want to ask you something about that because you're an expert and I, like learning it in these conversations, man. I'm still kind of surprised what you just explained to me is one of the duh's of our industry, right? Employee experience drives customer experience. And yet there's so many companies that still haven't figured that out. They still haven't accepted that. I was talking to a partner yesterday who, shared a phrase that I've heard for the first time when we were talking about this, And he said, yeah, in so many places, the contact center agents are still the last ones to the buffet table, and it's interesting to me because, they have the biggest impact. On the business from a, from a customer perspective. I mean, you just explained it perfectly and yet I don't know. Why do you think it's taken so long to catch on? I think a lot of it has to do with the command and control structure of a business and the way that each one of those silos is managed. So you've got your marketing, you've got your business development and sales teams, you have your operations construct. Then you have people that are fundamentally managing could be adoption cycles, right? Maybe it's like an implementation and then advocacy. Hey, if you're having a problem, give us a call. We'll help you out with it. And so the most organizations don't have like A centralized customer experience leader. So it may sit, who knows it may sit with marketing. It may sit somewhere else inside the business. If it sits with operations is probably about like maintaining and optimizing costs. Well, if you're with the CMO, it's about how do we get net new business? How do we get customer lifetime value? Because that's not unified all the way across, there isn't this consistent understanding of the customer journey all the way through. And I'll give you a case in point. Here's, here's a good example. Cause I'm going to ask you next up here, a little bit about data. Maybe this is an intro into data. Okay. One of the things we work with clients all the time is around a customer data platform as a way of routing data. And this is the user story that I always give person customer a calls has an absolutely. Horrendously bad conversation with somebody in the contact center. 10 minutes later, the marketing automation system sends out a happy email to that person, thereby causing them to seem like deaf, dumb and blind and not clued into the fact that they had a bad time. You feel even more distanced from that company, that service provider than ever before. But what if you are able to think holistically around the experience, you're able to take an experience that happened in the contact center. We can track sentiment, we can track completeness. We can select that as an event. We can pick that up inside of our customer data platform. We can, based upon the decisioning that we have there, change in status in that customer. The status is now unhappy. Well, however you want to put it, we can send an update to the marketing automation solution. Maybe it's Marketo or something along those lines, and we can pull human being from a cadence. That they're in the happy cadence, the happy customer line, where we're introducing new offers to them simultaneously, we can update inside of the CRM, maybe based upon account based management, a human being, actually, call up that person and say, Betty, we messed up. We are super sorry we recognize you as a valued customer. This is what we want to do for you, et cetera, et cetera, because there's no connectivity around that, what you're talking about is, is occurring on a regular basis and it's a silent killer, the contact center is a cost center. It's about optimizing the costs, squishing costs, tightening costs, but losing sight of the fact that they could be creating enormous business lift and enormous customer lifetime value. Yeah, exactly. Right. Actually you, put a perspective on that the hierarchy perspective that I, was missing a little bit. To understand because I've always looked at the, what I felt where, where some kind of,, displaced priorities or opportunities misses. But, yeah, like you said that there's no, if there's no 1 solely responsible for that level of service, like, no executive customer, experience officer, something like that, then everyone's kind of minding their own store and hoping that it, happens by osmosis,, so of course we know that doesn't work in this case. You have a heart for the agent. I love that. Brandon, thanks for being on the show. I appreciate it, man. Thanks for, thanks for doing what you do.
