Revolutionizing Workforce Optimization: ZOOM International

Corporations large and small are dependent on customer satisfaction to drive revenue and brand reputation. As any organization grows, its offerings and clientele scale with it and throughout that maturation there is no more critical component than happy customers. Customer service has become an industry in itself with companies from every sector maintaining elaborate systems and processes to provide support to their customers. At a time when technology is advancing at an astounding rate and markets continue to fluctuate, the needs of the customer are a critical bellwether for forecasting profits.

With increased access to the internet, there are now various ways and means available for corporations to interact with and provide the necessary support to their customers. One of the most important aspects of efficient customer support is the provision of a contact center. Simply put, a contact center is an organization set up by corporations exclusively for the purpose of providing full-time support for their customers. Unlike call centers, contact centers provide omnichannel access allowing their customers to interact through multiple channels such as; phone calls, email, VOIP, messaging and others.

ZOOM International is one of the world’s leading customer experience solution providers for contact centers. Simply put, it is an established market leader in helping organizations understand how their customers feel when utilizing their products or availing their services. With over 2200 customers & partners ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies, ZOOM has helped its clients capture the pulse of the market, improve customer satisfaction and expand their own base of customers.

ZOOM has an internal system developed for capturing and reacting to their own customers’ sentiment in near real time, using automated NPS surveys, analytics, workflow, notifications and customer experience processes to create an exceptionally positive sentiment from their own customer base. In fact, their NPS score for the trailing 365 days is an astoundingly high 87 when companies like Apple and Amazon’s scores are around 70. They share a similar set of capabilities in their software platform with their clients to help elevate every encounter with their own customers. For those reasons, there is simply no other software provider in the contact center space that has the level of measurable trust and customer happiness that ZOOM does.

A Unique Customer Focused Approach

Workforce Optimization (WFO) is a business model that consolidates contact center technologies for enhancing customer experience and bolsters operational efficiency. Over the last 20 years, ZOOM International has developed software solutions for contact centers with over nineteen hundred customers in 94 countries. Three-fourths of the company’s revenue is derived from its contact center customers and with the remainder from back-office operational organizations.

Established in 1999, the company initially struggled to establish a firm customer base, however through effort and ingenuity, ZOOM established an exceptional service reputation capitalizing on the massive global market of customer support and contact centers. But what the company wants to focus on is the customer interaction part of the support infrastructure. With an established base of customers, ZOOM aspires to become the leading software solution provider for contact centers and back office teams. Their strategy to win is simple: simplification, centralization and speed to find critical customer interactions requires the ability to search across all channels (phone calls, emails, chats, texts, etc.) with as much ease as one has while searching for something on Google.

Knowing what the customer wants is an excellent indicator of where the market should be headed. Discerning market patterns is an extremely difficult task, and what better way to go about it than turning to the customer support infrastructure to yield useful data about where customer affinities lie?

Customer support is all about helping a customer derive the greatest value from a product or a service. Companies from every sector invest considerable amounts of revenue into providing a reliable means of customer support and satisfaction. ZOOM helps them elevate contact center operations and positive service to another level. By developing software to enable its clients to analyze all of their interactions with their customers, ZOOM has provided means for companies to learn about the general customer sentiment towards their products and services. This sheds light on what a company is doing right and where it needs to improve to maintain clients and protect revenue.

In order to accomplish its goal of leveraging customer interactions in the simplest way possible, ZOOM invested heavily to develop features leveraging Solr, a search analytics engine that would allow corporations to comb through all of the interactions they’ve had with their customers, past and present, to know which of their products and services are popular and which are not. Solr is extremely effective and forms a technological cornerstone upon which companies like Netflix, Instagram, and eBay base their offerings. ZOOM’s very own survey technology makes it easier to have a workflow process to identify areas that are not performing as per expectations and improve upon their offerings.

One of ZOOM’s early differentiators is its media capture technology. As the name suggests, it allows users to record audio, video, phone calls and customer interactions across multiple channels. These can later be used to measure customer sentiment or meet compliance objectives and improve operational efficiency. Their media capture software was developed on a Solr based platform and remains the most popular of ZOOM’s products.

To further assist contact centers, ZOOM developed an in-house speech analytics engine to automatically “tag” interactions using phrases spoken during calls. It allows quality assessment managers at client companies to review hundreds of thousands of interactions with consumers and look for certain commonly used phrases that are indicators of levels of customer satisfaction. Corporations belonging to internet services, telecommunications, hospitality, healthcare, banking & finance, etc. interact with hundreds of customers each day and knowing the general sentiment towards their offerings goes a long way in shaping policy decisions. Such a comprehensive approach towards customer welfare ensures retention and subsequently, high revenues and a larger market share.

Innovative Contact Center Products

ZOOM has managed to graft technology into the contact center space and maximize its footprint and has done so by emphasizing groundbreaking innovation every step of the way. In light of this, it should come as no surprise that ZOOM has begun tapping one of the most advanced and talked about spheres of technologies currently available – artificial intelligence or AI.

Artificial intelligence is the hot buzzword of the entire global tech industry. In layman’s terms, AI is any sort of intelligence demonstrated by machines. It is without a doubt the future of technology and is well on its way to being incorporated into every aspect of the business. So, it was obvious that a highly innovative company like ZOOM would find a way to leverage this piece of technology to further elevate their solutions. Artificial Intelligence and machine learning algorithms, true to how they sound, require data or input to be able to learn a particular task and keep getting better at it. In other words, AI is only as good as the data that is given to it. ZOOM has committed considerable resources into developing what it calls the “emotion of the customer engine”. For a company that prides itself on determining the sentiment of customers, a machine learning powered algorithm that processes all the customer responses from numerous surveys would be extremely helpful in helping its clients to know what reactions to expect from their customers. Moreover, the large cache of customer data that is gathered from all customer interactions is the perfect input to get the desired output. For a company like ZOOM which is hyper focused on customer emotions, artificial intelligence and machine learning are some of the most promising tools to help them capitalize on growth opportunities and expand their foothold over the market.

As a part of their continued technology investment, ZOOM is also converting their software platform to a cloud native architecture. Cloud native is an approach of designing and hosting applications from the cloud and providing services like container engines, orchestrators and continuous integration. It is especially useful for companies that are looking to hyperscale existing products and keep operational costs at a minimum. Using Kubernetes, docker and other open source cloud native technologies, they are developing a one-of-a-kind fully portable and secure software platform. The new platform is simpler to manage and operable on clouds by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure as well as Rackspace. The same platform and products will support hundreds of thousands of users in the cloud and/or can be installed on premises or within hybrid configurations. The modern architecture for these types of platforms also allow maximum extensibility using secured APIs and perform very well at scale for larger customers while remaining cost effective for smaller ones.

Summary

ZOOM continues to develop using the latest technologies, wow its customers with exceptional service and to provide a uniquely trusted workforce management platform for contact center organizations. Their extensive industry experience, innovative technologies and proven ability to elevate customer experience make them a compelling choice for contact centers and back office organizations of any size or scope. It is easy to see why they are one of the 50 most trustworthy companies in 2019.

Awards

ZOOM International has received multiple awards and recognition for excellence including:

Gartner

Gartner recognized ZOOM International as an insightful emerging vendor in 2012, 2013, 2014, in the Greater Magic Quadrant for Workforce Optimization.

ZOOM International is also one of 7 on the new Gartner WEM Magic Quadrant in 2018.

CRM Service Leaders and Awards

ZOOM International is “One to Watch” for the third year running as a Best Workforce Optimization (WFO) software in the 2019 CRM Service Leaders Awards.

DMG Consulting, LLC

Recognized in reports for 2012, 2013 and 2014 in the Workforce Optimization Market and Product Report by DMG Consulting, LLC.

In December 2014, DMG ranked ZOOM International #1 WFO vendor in Customer Satisfaction.

Let’s look at some testimonials from happy customers & partners

“[ZOOM has] given us a clear view of what our agents are doing on the phones. It allowed us to listen to their calls, and to coach and develop our agents. Without the ZOOM quality management or the call rec system, we would not be able to have that process in place.”

- Patrice Chance, Memorial Hermann Health Services

“[ZOOM is] a company that actually love (s) solving problems and, as an engineer, I love that. I love solving problems for my customers.”

- Kevin Parrett, VP, Contact Center at Presidio

“The difference between ZOOM and other vendors is that they showed great flexibility during implementation, and they provide very fast and effective support if issues arise.”

- Finansbank

“Implementation went smoothly, and the production stage confirmed the high quality. As a result, we increased the number of licenses and now have over 500 seats recorded by ZOOM.”

- Tauron

The driving force behind ZOOM International’s meteoric rise

Brian Shore, CEO: Brian is a metrics and outcome focused executive, investor, and mentor based in Franklin, TN. Under his leadership, the company experienced a 30%+ compound annual growth rate and substantially expanded its customer and partner base from 86 to 2,370. He further led ZOOM to receive multiple awards from industry analysts and achieve recognition as a major WEM software player. ZOOM has been recognized on the Gartner Magic Quadrant six out of the prior seven years.

Before his role as CEO, Brian managed ZOOM’s service organization, building a customer serving culture that is measurably the best in the industry. ZOOM’s NPS scores from their customers moved from a 65 in 2014 to an 87 NPS today (trailing 365 days), demonstrating his passion and leadership around serving the needs of customers.

Prior to ZOOM, Brian was a leading Sales Account and Regional Manager for both CISCO & Dentsply. He holds degrees in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from the University of Georgia, as well as focused coursework from Harvard Business School Executive Education. Brian co-founded Rock Royalty Custom Guitars in 2010, a luxury design house that manufactures the world’s most opulent guitars and luxury apparel. In his spare time, Brian serves on several company Board of Directors, invests in local technology companies, and provides advice and mentorship to other leaders. Brian is most proud of his incredible wife, Rachel, and their four amazing children: Benjamin, Savannah, Jacob & Sophia.

“We are obsessed with helping our customers elevate encounters with their own customers.”