Dive Brief:
- Zoom is leaning into its contact center solution — software to help companies manage, route and record their calls — as a new avenue of growth. Executives on a Q3 2024 earnings call on Nov. 20 said the software reached 700 clients in Q3, up from 500 the previous quarter, for the period ending Oct. 31.
- Zoom is also investing in self-service customer assistance with its AI-powered chatbot. The number of companies using Zoom Virtual Agent nearly doubled in Q3 from Q2, according to CFO Kelly Steckelberg, though she declined to provide exact numbers.
- “These proof points demonstrate our customers’ willingness to entrust us with their critical CX and EX processes, and their commitment to grow with us as we expand our platform,” Steckelberg said on the call.
Dive Insight:
Zoom is drawing upon its experience with workforce management platforms to position itself as a major player in the contact center industry.
Zoom introduced Zoom Contact Center in February 2022 and bundled multiple tools into the CX-focused Zoom Workforce Engagement Management suite in September. The goal is to create an end-to-end contact center solution for businesses of any size, according to founder and CEO Eric Yuan.
“In terms of our workforce management contribution, it really helped because we tell [customers], ‘Hey, we offer everything to you,’” Yuan said. “We are not going to let you deploy other third-party workforce management solutions. We offer all the services, all the functionality to you with one platform.”
One of Zoom’s key goals for its contact center as a service offering is scalability. While Yuan called out mid-sized companies as Zoom’s “sweet spot,” the solution is designed to benefit companies of any size.
Zoom is hoping to replicate the success of Zoom Phone, which launched in 2019 and reached about 7 million paid seats in Q3 2023, according to Yuan. He noted that some thought it would take years for a paid cloud phone service to take off, but it ultimately achieved rapid adoption.
“I think we are going to follow a similar journey, and maybe even better, because if you look at our content center and modern architecture, it’s extremely stable, and plus it has a lot of AI features and [speedy] innovation,” Yuan said.
