On this episode of Futurum Live! From the Show Floor, The Futurum Group’s Craig Durr talks with Joseph Chong, the head of marketing for products, solutions, and industry marketing at Zoom, about the company’s latest innovations and how they’re enhancing the hybrid work experience.
Their discussion covers:
- The transformative role of AI in increasing productivity and enhancing collaboration on Zoom
- The integration of AI in Zoom’s CX and its application in events and the Revenue Accelerator
- The significance of WorkVivo in fostering corporate communication and engagement
- The introduction of Zoom Docs as a dynamic alternative to traditional document platforms
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Transcript:
Craig Durr: Hey, everybody. Craig Durr, Research Director with The Futurum Group. I am here live at Zoomtopia. We’re still coming to you live from the show floor, and I’m excited to share with you an interview I’ve been looking forward to with Joseph Chong. Joseph is the head of marketing for products, solutions, and industry marketing. Joseph, how are you doing?
Joseph Chong: Doing great.
Craig Durr: Good.
Joseph Chong: Great having you at Zoomtopia.
Craig Durr: This has been a really great event. You guys have had so much innovation launched on stage. I was talking to someone earlier and I joked about the alphabet soup, but you cover all these areas and let’s talk about it. You have AI, CS, and EX, right?
Joseph Chong: That’s right.
Craig Durr: It’s a lot coming out. Why don’t you share with me a little bit about each of them? Let’s talk about AI to start off with.
Joseph Chong: That’s a trifecta. AI, it’s a transformational technology, and the way we think about it is, number one, increasing productivity, and then we’re a collaboration platform, so how can it help us collaborate better? Then thirdly, just how do we enhance people’s skillset with it?
Craig Durr: Okay.
Joseph Chong: Those are the main areas of value that we’re trying to provide.
Craig Durr: Yeah. Now, I had some time talking to Jeff Smith earlier. We talked about the meeting experience of AI, but it touches on a lot of other areas of your product. Share with me… we talked about CX and we talked about some other areas where it touches as well.
Joseph Chong: Yeah, so AI Companion is our horizontal that goes across the knowledge worker use cases, but in the CX we have some really great applications of AI. One of them is in our events platform, which we put Zoomtopia on our hybrid events platform.
Craig Durr: Yeah, we’re using it today.
Joseph Chong: One of the key capabilities is when you talk to events organizers, just sending out those invitations and the registration emails, it’s a chore because you’ve got to pull in information from a lot of different places and it can be templatized. So, in our email builder, we’re activating AI so that it can build those registration and invitation emails for you, just pulling from different sources if you’re an event organizer. So, that’s going to be a huge time saver-
Craig Durr: It is.
Joseph Chong: … and a really simple but powerful use case.
Craig Durr: You also have AI integrated into a revenue engine, the Revenue Accelerator. Tell me about that.
Joseph Chong: Well, salespeople love to use Zoom because it’s just a high quality meetings experience. So, within Revenue Accelerator, it’s just the coaching, the training, and the use cases that will help sellers level up the way they present themselves from a sentiment perspective, word choice, looking at what words were used, competitor terms, to help just coach them up.
Craig Durr: It’s a compelling use case. I’m really excited about that. Well, there’s AI. Let’s talk a little bit deeper about CX. Now, we saw a great demonstration of the CX experience and the customer experience on stage during the keynote. Talk to me a little bit more about that.
Joseph Chong: I’m going to put those two together.
Craig Durr: Okay. Do it.
Joseph Chong: So, CX and Contact Center in particular, huge investment area for Zoom. People just want to use that simple Zoom interface that they use every day, but use it to help serve their customers at their customer service touchpoints. The way AI comes together in our CX is we announced AI Expert Assist. There’s a contact center agent. They’re just serving their customer with a customer issue, and it’s able to serve up information to them during the course of the conversation that’s useful. So, like a knowledge base article, instructions, installation information, and just in that conversation that’s happening either on the phone or via video, it can serve it up in the interface so the agent can resolve that case faster and have better first call resolution. So, it hits the bottom line.
Craig Durr: You had a really great demonstration on stage. I really enjoyed it. The customer was asking about warranty information. It served it up. It gave a rating about relevancy based upon was it relevant to the conversation or not. It was fantastic. Then one of the last areas that I was really excited to see shown on stage was the Workvivo integration, the EX experience. Employees are such a key part and acknowledging this internal communication as essential to building culture, to building happiness, what Zoom wants to talk about.
Joseph Chong: Absolutely. So, this is what we all collectively realize is we’ve all gone hybrid, most companies, but engagement is low and there’s a lot of quiet quitting out there. There’s some studies that show 6 in 10 workers are quiet quitting. They’re just disengaged. So, engagement and culture is super important. Workvivo is that hub for communication, for CEO communication on down to the company, but all other stakeholders too, community, so there’s community spots, there’s recognition, kudos. So, it brings that corporate communication engagement up to a whole new level, and what we’re excited about is that we’re embedding it in the Zoom experience.
Craig Durr: Yeah, it’s fantastic. It’s right there in the application itself on the bar too I saw.
Joseph Chong: Best of both worlds in Zoom, but it can also just be a tab on the web as well. It’s the best of both worlds.
Craig Durr: That’s great. I love the fact that what we’re addressing here is that hybrid experience. So, it’s not even just about where I work, but it’s about how I’m engaging with people, where I’m seeing them, what’s the conversations we’re having? Building that culture, even if it’s through those small touch points, I think is a key element that you guys are bringing together there.
Joseph Chong: It’s that, and we can’t leave out the actual physical workspace. We’ve got everything from Workspace Reservation. So, I use this every week. I don’t go to the same desk every time I go into the office.
Craig Durr: You guys only have shared desks.
Joseph Chong: Shared desks, twice a week. I go into Workspace Reservations a couple days before, I reserve my desk, and then when I get there I check-in. We’re adding way both wayfinding capabilities and AI to that as well.
Craig Durr: Right, I saw that.
Joseph Chong: So, wayfinding, it’s a map to help you get to the desk because in a different place each time, and then the AI is just helping you sit next to people that you work closely with.
Craig Durr: Yeah. You’re building out a really powerful workplace experience platform, and that’s the way that I view it. Now, we’ve talked about this other alphabet soup, but there’s another product that you are really excited about you and I were talking about. That was the announcement of Zoom Docs. Tell me about that. I’m really excited about that one.
Joseph Chong: Zoom Docs is going to be the productivity enhancer, and what we say is think about the main docs products that are out there, they’re literally based on an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper. It’s very static, not really built for hybrid work. So, Zoom Docs does all of the basic use cases of text, write a report, collaborate on a briefing, you can write an essay or poem, but you can also bring in intelligent…
Craig Durr: Dynamic information.
Joseph Chong: Dynamic information, and that information, whether it’s a table, a project management sheet, smart recording, AI Companion, building content for you, it lives in modules, so it’s reusable in different documents. Really powerful the way it comes together, and it’s in Zoom and independent. So, it’s really easy to use within the Zoom experience.
Craig Durr: Right. What I saw on stage being walked through around Docs about its integration into the meeting workflow, for example, dynamically dropping into a team chat prior to the meeting, having it available to everyone to share content as they’re in that meeting itself, and then living on afterwards.
Joseph Chong: Afterwards.
Craig Durr: It’s a fantastic thing. You’re right. It’s no longer about a static eight and a half by eleven sheet of paper, right?
Joseph Chong: That’s right.
Craig Durr: It’s a little more dynamic. Well, Joseph, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing these updates. I can’t wait to see how this all rolls out this next year. It’s going to be an exciting year for you guys.
Joseph Chong: Awesome. Enjoyed that. Thank you.
Craig Durr: Hey everyone, this is Craig with The Futurum Group. Thank you so much. We are here live at Zoomtopia, and we’ll bring you some more information shortly. Take care.
Author Information
As Practice Lead - Workplace Collaboration, Craig focuses on developing research, publications and insights that clarify how the workforce, the workplace, and the workflows enable group collaboration and communication. He provides research and analysis related to market sizing and forecasts, product and service evaluations, market trends, and end-user and buyer expectations. In addition to following the technology, Craig also studies the human elements of work - organizing his findings into the workforce, the workplace, and the workflows – and charting how these variables influence technologies and business strategies.
Prior to joining Wainhouse, now a part of The Futurum Group, Craig brings twenty years of experience in leadership roles related to P&L management, product development, strategic planning, and business development of security, SaaS, and unified communication offerings. Craig's experience includes positions at Poly, Dell, Microsoft, and IBM.
Craig holds a Master of Business Administration from the Texas McCombs School of Business as well as a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Tulane University.
