Zoom Drops a Mega Virtual Agent Upgrade, Gives Its Contact Center a GenAI Makeover

The enterprise communications giant teased new capabilities for agents, supervisors, and quality teams at Zoomtopia 2024

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Published: October 9, 2024

Charlie Mitchell

Zoomtopia 2024 has set the stage for the “next-generation” Zoom Virtual Agent.

From December, the solution will detect when a customer query contains multiple intents and go through each in a single session.

Moreover, the Zoom Virtual Agent may isolate occasions when customers change their intent midway through an interaction and pivot with them.

Before the end of the year, Zoom also promises to introduce an AI Virtual Voice Agent, extending these capabilities to voice.

Yet, even on digital channels, the new features will likely help businesses automate many more complex, multi-faceted conversations.

In doing so, Zoom customers may develop more sophisticated self-service experiences, bolster their containment rates, and limit escalations.

As Michelle Couture, Global Product Marketing Lead for Customer Experience at Zoom, stated during a Zoomtopia briefing:

This evolution will significantly reduce the need to transfer calls to live agents unless absolutely necessary, lowering interaction costs and improving the overall customer experience.

To further lower interaction costs, businesses may utilize several other existing features within the Zoom Virtual Agent. For instance, they may take the opportunity to leverage LLMs that pick from trusted knowledge sources, so the bot converses with customers without prior training.

Meanwhile, the solution also allows CX teams to develop rule-based workflows when resolving an intent requires the virtual agent to ask an explicit set of questions.

As such, Zoom customers can mix and match these approaches to best deal with common and emerging customer contact reasons.

Yet, the enterprise communications juggernaut doesn’t only integrate GenAI into its Virtual Agent; it’s embedded across its platform.

Of course, that includes the Zoom Contact Center, which now offers new GenAI-powered capabilities for agents, supervisors, quality analysts, and resource planners.

Here’s a closer look at some of the new features that will impact these critical customer service stakeholders.

Zoom’s Latest Innovations for Contact Center Agents & Supervisors

Zoom has unveiled four new capabilities to boost agent and supervisor experiences, which the vendor expects to be available on the Zoom Contact Center in December 2024.

The first is a new co-browsing with a PII masking feature, which will allow customers to share their screens with agents during video engagements without exposing their personal information.

By harnessing this capability, agents can visualize problems, troubleshoot faster, and ultimately accelerate time to resolution.

The other three tools will sit inside the AI Expert Assist module, which already retrieves real-time insights for agents, recommends next-best actions, suggests disposition codes, and more.

1. Dynamic Agent Guides

Dynamic Agent Guides allows contact centers to build interactive scripts for agents handling everyday customer queries. Agents may flick through these as they resolve cases.

While that’s a familiar concept, Zoom has taken this further, using real-time customer interaction insights to dynamically skip to the most relevant step.

So, for example, if a customer has already completed steps one to three, the guide will prompt the agent to start at step four, avoiding unnecessary repetition.

Zoom Dynamic Agent Guides
Zoom Dynamic Agent Guides

2. Suggested Answer

Suggested Answer uses AI to analyze CRM data and multiple knowledge base articles to generate a recommended response for agents.

With this capability, agents can quickly review, edit, and send customer responses to simplify the contact handling process.

As such, reps can keep conversations moving without pausing and sifting through various pieces of knowledge content.

Zoom Suggested Answer
Zoom Suggested Answer

3. Supervisor Flagging

Supervisor Flagging highlights customer interactions requiring immediate attention by picking up on signals such as low customer sentiment, long contact durations, multiple transfers, etc.

Team leaders may leverage this with tools such as “Whisper” and “Barge” to offer agents real-time support when they need it most.

However, caution is necessary when implementing Supervisor Flagging. After all, agents may feel uncomfortable and under surveillance without proper assurances about how supervisors will utilize the features.

Zoom Supervisor Flagging
Zoom Supervisor Flagging

Zoom’s Latest Innovations for Quality Analysts and Resource Planners

Alongside additions to its CCaaS platform, Zoom bolstered its Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) suite, which offers solutions for contact center quality assurance (QA) and workforce management (WFM).

First, it became the latest vendor to introduce Auto Quality Management (Auto-QM), a feature that utilizes AI to score 100 percent of customer conversations. That enables a broader view of agent performance, coaching gaps, and broken processes. It also better informs manual call monitoring.

More uniquely, however, Zoom introduced a conversational interface for its QA solution: Zoom Contact Center Ask Quality Management. The new interface allows quality analysts to query transcripts, isolate improvement opportunities, and spot agents doing excellent things.

Zoom Contact Center Ask Quality Management
Zoom Contact Center Ask Quality Management

Finally, Zoom has added Shift Bidding to its WFM solution. This will offer agents an online portal to select their shifts each week.

While Shift Bidding is far from every operation’s dream scheduling option, it’s becoming increasingly popular as more contact centers offer casual shifts to reps on zero-hour contracts.

Moreover, it simplifies the traditional scheduling process, as resource planners don’t have to factor in individual shift preferences or worry about posting unfair schedules. It’s simply first come, first serve.

Zoom Shift Bidding
Zoom Shift Bidding

Elsewhere at Zoomtopia 2024

While these are all the CX announcements, Zoomtopia has celebrated the launch of many more innovations across Zoom’s unified platform.

Much of the hype will focus on the Zoom AI Companion 2.0 announcement.

Critically, this will move across Zoom Workplace and beyond. As such, it won’t stay inside one application. Instead, it will scour chats, emails, documents, and meetings to answer employee questions or inform communications.

Moreover, the AI Companion 2.0 won’t just stick to Zoom applications. It will also synthesize information from Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.

To further expand its reach, Zoom has also launched a Custom AI Companion add-on for Zoom Workplace. This will allow customers to connect various apps to AI Companion, including Jira, ServiceNow, and Workday.

Away from the AI Companion, the enterprise communications giant unveiled an AI Studio, Zoom Tasks, and much more.

To keep tabs on all this and dive deeper into Zoom’s strategy, CX Today will soon release a top takeaways article from Zoomtopia 2024.

Don’t want to miss it? Subscribe to the CX Today Newsletter.

 

 

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