Zoom Expands CX Orchestration Through Conversation (Full Transcript)

[00:00:02] Speaker 1: If you've taken a briefing from any CX or CRM vendor in the last year, you've probably heard some version of, we now orchestrate your workflows end-to-end, bringing together things like case management, cross-department handoffs, workflow automation. People have been solving these pieces for like a while now, right? And in the last year, we've seen some of the biggest platforms in the market. The ones you're probably already running have shipped real capability here. So I'm not going to stand up here and tell you this is new or that nobody else does it. That's not true. And I'm not interested in adding another version of that pitch to the pile. What I want to do today is talk about something much more specific. And it's the part that actually decides how good any of that orchestration can be. Where does the signal come from in the first place? Because a workflow engine is only as good as what feeds it. And that behaves very differently depending on where that sits. I want you to think about it like this. You can have two companies. They buy the exact same orchestration engine, CX platform. They run the exact same playbooks, and they get completely different results. Because one of them is only feeding that engine with contact center transcripts. And the other is feeding it with contact center transcripts, sales calls, store visits, and back office tickets. Same engine, different fuel, different outcomes. Now, here's the pattern that I see across the market today. Some platforms orchestrate from a case record. The ticket gets opened once, an issue is formally logged. That's powerful, right? But the orchestration only starts when something becomes a case. Everything before that, the sales call, the kiosk interaction, the conversation on the phone line that never touches the system, never enters the picture. And it could be that a conversation your best rep had with a customer three weeks ago that explains exactly why they're calling in today. And that history is sitting in a system nobody downstream can see. It's a missed opportunity. And other platforms orchestrate from the contact center interaction itself. The call or the chat that came through the queue, also powerful, right? But also bounded. So if the signal happened outside the queue, in a store, in an email to the back office team, on a specialist line, it's invisible to that engine too. And both of these are real products solving real problems for real customers. But what neither one starts from is the full conversation your business is actually having before anything gets logged as a case or routed to a queue. In fact, 9 out of 10 CX leaders say connecting conversations to outcomes is their single biggest challenge. And that's not a guess. That's from research that we ran this year across CX leaders like you. And it was that single most common answer that we got. Ahead of cost, ahead of headcount, ahead of tooling. Not because nobody has orchestration. It's because most orchestration is only as wide as the one surface it was built to watch. So what actually closes this gap? Well, you need to think about it in kind of a measure. We need to walk through a journey here from like a good, better, best scenario. Good is what we have been trying to solve for for a while now, right? One suite across every channel. It solves for fragmentation, but not always for outcomes. Because your channels are connected, but your results aren't necessarily being connected in that way. Fire is a platform that orchestrates really well from wherever it starts. Whether that's a case record or the context center queue, if that engine is well built, it reasons over what's inside its own walls and triggers real action. And that's genuinely good. And it's where a lot of the market has landed. It might be where you're sitting today. The challenge is it's still bounded by its starting point. It really can't reason over conversations it was never present for. And if it can't easily reach the three or four teams outside its own walls who might need to act next, then it's not getting the full picture. And most vendors stop here. And it's not because they don't want to go further. It's the way they're architected. It's complicated, right? So the market is optimizing the engine it already has instead of expanding what feeds it. Now, the best is a platform that starts from the broadest possible signal set because it's already present in the conversation itself. It's not waiting for that conversation to become a case or to get routed to a queue. Every surface from your virtual agent, your live agent, your phone, your chat, your video, your kiosk, your back office, all coming together in one context layer. And there's reasoning across all of those signals and one orchestration engine acting on top of it. From the first touch to the final outcome across the entire enterprise, not just inside whatever system happened to log it first. That is the real distinction. Not who has orchestration, not who sees more before they even have to orchestrate anything. And that's the bar. That's what I want to show you that we're building. So we're going to walk through this in three dimensions, conversation, context, and completion. And for each one, I'm going to show you what's new, why it matters, and how it closes a gap. Now let's start with conversation. Scaling automated CX isn't about adding channels for the sake of it. It's truly about reducing customer friction and showing up wherever your customers already are with real resolution waiting for them, not just a simple greeting. So to do that, we're bringing Zoom Virtual Agent into new physical and digital spaces. And this is starting with a ZVA-powered kiosk in-stores. So imagine this. I'm a customer in a retail location. I have a question about a product. There's a ZVA-powered kiosk right there on the floor, maybe in the aisle that I'm standing in. I walk up, ask my question, and get an answer on the spot. Or I can even get connected to the right associate or agent immediately if the virtual agent doesn't have the answer. I don't have to spend my time hunting for help or waiting around trying to solve that problem. And because it's connected to the same context layer as the rest of the system, the virtual agent has context around the customer. It's able to recall personalized details like what colors they prefer. It can even recall prior purchase history to give them guidance on if that's the right product for them to buy. That's automated CX reaching a space it's never covered before. Now, I want you to think for a minute what that means at scale. Because every one of these kiosk interactions is a conversation your system used to be completely blind to. If a customer walked in, couldn't find help, and just walked out, you never even knew they were there. You never captured that intent. And now you can. And that signal, what they asked, what they needed, whether it was resolved, it all feeds the same context layer as your calls, your chats, your emails. Your picture of the customer just got dramatically wider. And we're extending that reach even further. ZBA now handles email as well, fully automated support for resolution. And our multilingual voice now covers nine core languages. So customers get help in the language that they actually speak. And we have new vertical integrations with companies like DHL, UPS, PCI-PAL, and so many more. And that means that the virtual agent is able to resolve more in those moments, not just deflecting, answering, or handing off and escalating, being able to take real agentic action in the moment to gather information and solve customer problems. So same idea everywhere. You show up where the customer is. You are in their language. You're on their channel. And you actually resolve it there. Every surface you add isn't just a channel. It's a signal source. And every signal is helping to make that system a lot smarter. But here's where the altitude shift happens. And here's why orchestration threads through everything, not just the last beat. Zoom virtual agent isn't a standalone agent sitting next to your contact center. It's built from it. And it's wired into the same systems as the rest of your CX stack. Our new agent architect builds virtual agents directly from your real Zoom contact center transcripts. It's not just using generic training data. So the virtual agent reflects exactly how your best live agents actually handle your customers. And once it's live, it isn't working off its own separate record. Every interaction reads and writes back to the same context layer as your contact center and your phone system. We're also closing knowledge gaps automatically, pulling from ServiceNow support tickets so your team doesn't have to go around searching and finding them. That connection is what lets ZVA act past the point that most virtual agents stop. Plenty of agents can resolve something when everything they need sits inside their own four walls, verifying an identity, checking an order, issuing a refund. And Zoom virtual agent does all that too. But when the next step needs the warehouse to confirm the receipt or a specialist desk and a completely different tool, that's usually where it stops elsewhere. Because ZVA is wired directly into customer workflow orchestration, it triggers that workflow itself in the moment the conversation produces the signal. It doesn't have to escalate to an agent, drive a handoff. It doesn't mean that it's not going to create a ticket or just have to sit in a log queue. That's what conversation means in the connected journey. ZVA is built from your contact center. It shares context with the rest of your system and triggers what happens next itself. It isn't on an island, and that is exactly the point.