Most people still think of Zoom as the app they used too much during lockdown. Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, thinks that’s exactly the problem.
In a recent conversation with CX Today, Kerravala laid out why Zoom may be further along in its transformation than the market gives it credit for, and why CX leaders, in particular, should be paying close attention.
The company’s stated ambition is to shift from enabling collaboration to driving what it calls “completion,” where AI picks up after a conversation ends and handles the downstream work automatically.
Kerravala sees the contact center as the area where that vision has the most immediate impact, pointing to customers like Chelsea FC and Caliber Collision already using Zoom’s platform to unify CX across phone, virtual agents, and analytics.
He also offers a contrarian read on Zoom’s decision not to acquire Five9, arguing it forced the company to build a native, unified backend that is now a genuine competitive differentiator against CRM-first rivals.
But the biggest challenge, in his view, has nothing to do with product:
“Their biggest challenge is getting people to understand exactly what they’ve built and why they’ve built it. Eric Yuan, their CEO — he’s either a genius or a mad scientist. And sometimes those two things are just two sides of the same coin.”
With Zoomtopia approaching later this year, Kerravala expects a wave of vertical-specific innovation to follow, and says the metric worth watching isn’t seat growth, but whether customers are deriving genuine cross-platform value.
