How to boost customer loyalty with extensible AI-first contact center solutions

We're hitting a major inflection point in customer experience. Innovation in contact center solutions is growing at a rate that's hard for customer experience leaders to keep up with, accelerated by the arrival of GenAI. At the same time, customer experience (CX) is at an all-time low, as illustrated by our commissioned research, showing that 63% would leave a brand after just one or two bad experiences. Forrester's US Customer Experience Rankings 2024also forund that customer satisfaction has declined for 3 years in a row to reach an all-time low. As CX becomes increasingly critical to an organization's success, there's an urgent need for your customers to become a central pillar in your business operations. This means optimizing the customer journey at every touchpoint; pre-sale, during the sale, and post-sale, both inside and outside the contact center.

This switch in strategy may feel like a vast and overwhelming prospect. So where should you, as CX leaders, begin? In our recent session at Zoomtopia, we explored one of the most effective strategies to create a customer-led business: extensible AI-first contact center solutions or platforms. By harnessing extensibility, powered by AI, you have the potential to tackle some of the painful challenges you face every day that may be keeping you up at night. Think bringing together siloed and outdated systems, facilitating seamless interactions, and creating efficiencies, all of which build customer and agent loyalty in a highly competitive landscape. We're living in a time where every second counts. Read on as we dive into some of the takeaways from our session.

Harnessing extensibility: Transform your business process with Zoom CX

What is extensibility in contact center solutions?

When thinking about extensibility, a helpful way to look at it is the combination of flexibility and expandability. In other words, the ability of contact center solutions and tools to expand, adapt, and integrate with other systems to create a more seamless, personalized, and scalable customer journey. An extensible CX platform allows organizations to add new features, incorporate emerging technologies, or connect with additional apps and APIs without overhauling the entire system. Sounds like a life-saver when you're drowning in a sea of complexities.

Let's say, for example, a CX team wants to improve its self-service options. An extensible platform might enable them to add AI-driven virtual agent software or knowledge bases that integrate smoothly into their existing customer support system. Likewise, an extensible platform can integrate with CRMs, analytics tools, or other communication channels, allowing for a more complete and unified view of customer interactions across all touchpoints.

For Zoom Contact Center, extensibility first starts within the CX portfolio. You can leverage Zoom Virtual Agentto enable better self-service, Zoom Quality Management to monitor whether your agents are meeting SLAs and performance standards, and Zoom Workforce Managementto build optimal staffing schedules. From there, agents and supervisors can leverage tools in the rest of the Zoom Workplaceportfolio, like Zoom Team Chat,to connect with experts throughout the organization or enable more seamless handoffs between front and back office with Zoom Phone. If there are additional capabilities needed, you can leverage our third-party integrationsin verticals like CRM and ticketing, or build your own custom Zoom App.

This kind of adaptability is crucial for you as CX leaders. It helps you respond to changing customer needs, scale services efficiently, and introduce innovations to enhance the overall customer experience, leading to more loyalty from both agents and customers.

Three key reasons extensibility is so crucial for modern CX

Let's take a closer look at the importance of extensibility in your contact center.

1. Delivering personalized, omnichannel experiences

Customers expect to interact with brands on their terms and through their preferred channels-whether that be chat, social media, voice, or video. Extensible platforms, like Zoom Contact Center, help CX leaders deliver a consistent, personalized journey across all these touchpoints. They do this by creating an omnichannel experience, bringing all of the engagements a customer has had with your brand across every channel together in one interface. This adaptability provides a cohesive customer journey from start to finish and speeds up interactions by giving agents fast access to the customer's profile and history.

1. Scaling to meet changing customer service needs

Oftentimes, no two days are the same in the world of customer service. Extensible solutions allow CX leaders to scale their customer service up and down to meet fluctuating demands. By seamlessly integrating new tools like GenAI or advanced analytics, organizations can quickly expand their offerings or improve efficiencies without overhauling their existing infrastructure. This flexibility is especially beneficial if your brand aims to grow rapidly or needs to meet seasonal surges in demand.

1. Eliminating silos across your organization

Whereas a customer's primary touchpoint with an organization is typically through the contact center, customer satisfaction often relies on the teamwork of employees across your organization. Extensible, AI-driven platforms allow teams like sales, marketing, and support to collaborate more effectively, sharing real-time data and insights to meet customer needs proactively. For example, sales data on customer preferences can flow directly into support workflows, enabling agents to resolve inquiries faster and with greater context. Or, say, an agent needs to bring in a back-office subject matter expert (SME) to solve a customer inquiry. They can connect the call directly with all the AI-summarized context automatically available for the SME. This helps speed up interactions and avoid that repetition loop that frustrates customers and agents alike. Bringing your teams together in this way creates a more seamless customer journey, ultimately driving what we call a Total Experience.

Is your contact center future ready?

Real-world use case: InflectionCX's approach to enhancing CX with extensibility and AI

A powerful example of extensibility in action comes from Chris Crosby, Founder and CEO of InflectionCX, a boutique contact center outsourcer for multiple verticals, including healthcare and financial industries.InflectionCX recently underwent a significant technology overhaul to integrate Zoom Contact Center and meet the challenge of providing personalized, high-quality support in an increasingly digital environment. Chris's team leveraged Zoom Contact Center's API capabilities to build a unified customer support environment that seamlessly integrates with their CRM, AI, and analytics tools.

Here are three core benefits Chris's team are enjoying:

• Significantly reduced after-call work: With the help of AI Companion, InflectionCX can generate call summaries and transcriptions that can be automatically populated into their CRM. As a result, they've cut down their after-call work from four and a half minutes to under 30 seconds. They've also bolstered security by removing agents' need to access and move the data manually.
• Empowered agents with real-time knowledge:By putting their transcripts through AI analysis, they can pinpoint recurring issues and determine where agents struggle to find the answers. With this data, they've created their own knowledge base and integrated it back into Zoom AI Expert Assist, Zoom Contact Center's knowledge base system. This has enabled agents to access the right content right when they need it, helping them reduce call time by an average of 3 minutes.

Zoom AI Expert Assist in action

• A highly personalized customer experience:By building custom APIs within the Zoom Contact Center desktop, Chris's team can create very specific summaries and notations for a particular healthcare client in real time. This tool has helped increase accuracy levels in a highly regulated HIPAA environment by up to 25%.

This operational transformation has helped InflectionCX streamline workflows and create a more cohesive, data-driven customer experience, leading to significant improvements in customer satisfaction and retention.

Leveraging extensible contact center solutions for CX success

Let's say you already have a solution built on an extensible CX platform and are curious about how to leverage it for success. Or maybe you're just starting out and exploring different contact center solutions. Here's some low-hanging fruit that can help you get started when building an extensible CX platform.

1. Scaling with self-service options

Extensible systems allow organizations to integrate self-service capabilities directly into the CX ecosystem, such as AI-driven virtual agents, knowledge bases, and interactive FAQs. With a knowledge-rich self-service solution like Zoom Virtual Agent, you can reduce response times by enabling customers to access answers quickly, without the need to talk to a live agent. The result is what we're all after: increased customer satisfaction and the ability for agents to focus on more complex issues.

1. Unlocking Insights through data integration

Extensible AI-driven CX platforms allow you to connect customer data across multiple systems-such as CRM, analytics, and support tools-creating a comprehensive view of the customer journey. This valuable integrated data gives teams the whole picture to help predict customer needs and proactively address potential issues. The result is a highly personalized, informed approach to customer interactions.

1. Driving continuous improvement with feedback loops

With extensibility, customer feedback collection becomes more dynamic and actionable. Post-interaction surveys, ratings, and feedback mechanisms can be easily embedded, enabling you to continuously adjust and refine processes based on real customer insights. Customers' needs constantly evolve, so an iterative approach to improvement is crucial in sustaining customer loyalty and engagement.

Choosing the right extensible CX platform

When evaluating CX platforms, consider their integration capabilities with existing systems like your CRM, support tools, and AI solutions. It's best to find a platform that offers customization to meet specific business requirements without sacrificing usability. Ease of use is also a must to maintain and empower your agents. The right solution should empower your CX teams and everyone they touch in your organization to work efficiently, scale processes, and innovate continuously.

As brands look to the future, investing in extensible AI-powered contact center solutions will be essential for CX leaders aiming to drive long-term loyalty, improve operational efficiency, and get ahead of the competition.

For Chris Crosby at InflectionCX, the extensibility of the AI-first Zoom Contact Centerhas been a game-changer. It has helped InflectionCX transform its CX from a series of disconnected touchpoints into a streamlined, cohesive experience that aligns with customer expectations and can vastly improve efficiencies.

Watch the entire conversation with Chris Crosby at Zoomtopia 2024 and all the Zoomtopia sessions here.

We'd love to chat with you about how Zoom Contact Center can transform your organization into a customer-centric, future-ready business. Reach outand one of our CX experts would be happy to talk you through all the possibilities.