Even though it abandoned plans to merge with Five9, Zoom Video Communications’ pursuit of happiness continues apace. Quarterly revenues, overall, grew at a relatively modest (many analysts said “disappointing”) 12%, year-over-year. Yet they reached an eye-catching $1.1 billion, which reflected 31% growth in spending by by large enterprise clients. Large firms are finding it easy and affordable to support CEO Eric Yuan’s strategy of moving “into adjacent workflows, both horizontally and vertically, in order to ensure our customers are getting more and more out of our platform.” Thus you can expect more sales of international voice services, Zoom Phone and greater expectations for its contact center offering, especially in the wake of its acquisition of Solvvy.

In the quarterly earnings call with analysts, Yuan gave the example of healthcare giant Humana, which “expanded their relationship from Zoom meetings to include approximately 24,000 Zoom Phones to integrate voice and video in their communications platform.” This provides evidence of a growing willingness of enterprise decision makers to treat Zoom as a customer experience platform. As Yuan explained to analysts, “The nature of the customer experience is undergoing a fundamental transformation, as enterprises increasingly look to engage their customers in more exceptional, personalized, and effortless ways.”

Solvvy Adds Conversational AI to the Mix

Zoom already has an unspecified number of paying customers for its native contact center service. According to Yuan, they chose to add Zoom Contact Center to their conferencing services because they recognized that Zoom had already built a scalable call routing engine. As Yuan noted, core contact center features were “already built in.” The acquisition of Solvvy, which Zoom announced in mid-May, will make the nine-year-old company into Zoom’s native Conversational AI resource. Yuan expects Solvvy’s technology to “broaden our contact center offering with scalable self-service and AI capabilities that truly enable fast and personalized customer resolutions, improved agent productivity, and valuable insights.” Solvvy’s founding CEO Mahesh Ram and Co-Founder & CTO Justin Betteridge will join the team at Zoom to responsible for Advanced Conversational AI and Automation product vision and innovation strategy.

Genesys Stays Zoomed In

Zoom’s foray into the Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) space has not deterred one of the market leaders from upping the ante in a long-standing partnership. On June 6, The Genesys and Zoom announced the expansion of a two-year partnership based on the integration of Zoom Phone with Genesys Cloud CX. This agreement is an outgrowth of joint efforts that started in May 2020 in response to demand from a healthcare provider, Company Nurse, and a financial services company, Sentinel Benefits and Financial Group.

Integrating the two companies’ technologies allowed enterprises to mix-and-match capabilities to suit “real-world” requirements. For instance, a unified directory enabled contact center agents to see the status of internal employees and make direct connections in the course of a customer conversation to resolve a billing issue or address other needs in the course of a call. They also had the capability to initiate Zoom meetings without leaving their agent workspaces or they could simply “click to call” to transfer between the Genesys Cloud and Zoom Phone. Two years on, the joint offering has evolved into a formal product, complete with easy-to-configure controls and a network of go-to-market resources, including InflowCX, a consultancy with 25 years experience in managed services for contact center, customer experience, and unified communications.

The Conversational Cloud Means “Fit For Use”

Top executives at both Zoom and Genesys recognize that enterprise decision makers already employ multiple cloud-based resources. They mix-and-match what they perceive to be “best-of-breed” technologies to improve the experience of both customers and employees. Their vendor selection is use-case driven and they take a “fit for use” approach to analyzing service offerings to determine what best matches the specific requirements of a department or strategic objective.

In such a market environment, successful solution providers ultimately must cover four key foundational requirements – Self-Service, Routing, Conversational Intelligence and Integration – to fulfill on enterprise demand. Rivals for a sliver of enterprise cloud spending – such as Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) – lose access to a larger share-of-wallet if they are unwilling to interconnect and interoperate with others. They may feel like they are leaving money on the table for others to pick up. However, in cloud technology, as in the industries they serve, “the customer is always right.” That means that long-term success will be based on how well solution providers enable their customers to choose or stay with their preferred technologies, even when they are from other vendors.

Categories: Intelligent Assistants

Tags: customer experience, consumer engagement, Conversational Intelligence, automation, conversational cloud