How Zoom is scaling beyond the video call

You know your company's done well when it becomes a verb. “Shall we meet in person or Zoom?” is a common refrain in business.

The company was founded in 2011 in Silicon Valley and launched its video meeting platform in 2013 before floating on the Nasdaq in 2019. It shot to prominence during the lockdowns of the pandemic, when video calling suddenly became not just a novelty but a lifeline.

Its stock price increased by more than eightfold, but like other lockdown favourites such as Peloton and DocuSign, it crashed back down to earth again.

So half a decade after Covid, Zoom wants to be defined by something more. “We’re super proud of how the brand reacted to that time,” reflects Louise Newbury-Smith, head of Zoom in the UK & Ireland, “it was a pivotal moment for the business. But we deliver a lot more [than video calls now].”

We caught up with her to find out what. In our interview, you will learn about:

• Why Zoom now thinks of itself as an AI company
• What happens when Zoom's own staff go and physically shadow a customer's team to solve a problem
• The one lesson Newbury-Smith says most scaling businesses get wrong with their existing customers

The AI-powered pivot

Newbury-Smith has been in the role for just over a year. Zoom’s main growth area, she points out, is actually providing technology for customer contact centres. Over the past 12 months, this has doubled and now makes up roughly half of Zoom’s new business, she explains.

Zoom has built out its offer beyond video calls so that these business customers have access to an “end-to-end platform that can track the customer journey”, explains Newbury-Smith. Modern customer call centres have become highly sophisticated operations, with AI-powered chatbots interacting with humans. So Zoom has had to build an ecosystem to support this. Indeed, you can almost think of Zoom as an AI company now, Newbury-Smith argues.

The Zoom platform works with AI to perform tasks like managing calls and, for instance, suggesting lines of conversation in real time. The software also analyses the performance of human customer agents, looking at things like how much time they spend speaking versus listening, their efficiency at closing deals or upselling related products, or even their general attitude on a call. It’s an open platform designed to work with existing CRMs.

To get to this point with its product offering, Zoom had to make a large investment in R&D, which effectively enabled it to outmanoeuvre rivals who didn’t commit as much capital, says Newbury-Smith.

How to scale

So how is Zoom scaling this service, if its public perception doesn’t match its more evolved B2B customer offer?

One key lesson that Newbury-Smith shares is that you have to devote as much time to nurturing your existing customers as finding new ones.

In this endeavour, her Customer Success team plays a key role. By showing existing customers the full extent of what the platform can do, you can create more business. This creates “pull through to other areas of the platform”, explains Newbury-Smith, “because when customers realise that you've got AI as an umbrella across the top, they suddenly realise all the other use cases that they can unlock.”

This is another key lesson. You can’t assume customers will just figure out how to get the best out of your product. Rather, you have to nurture and educate them on how to do it. This is a worthy investment of time for any well-run business that is confident in the value of its product.

Automate the predictable

Newbury-Smith has a maxim when it comes to helping SMEs use AI: “Automate the predictable and humanise the unpredictable”. A case in point is some work they did recently with a dairy company, she says.

The company had a direct-to-consumer model for delivering milk. A pain point proved to be customers trying to pause deliveries while they went on holiday. The dairy company wanted to use AI to simplify this time-consuming process.

So Zoom worked with the customer team, even physically shadowing some of them in order to understand the practical issues at stake.

In the end, they figured the solution required identity verification of the people getting in touch, which could be automated through a voice-bot and then a rebooking procedure coordinated by a virtual agent. The whole journey could be automated without human involvement.

“That's saved them an absolute chunk of time that their people can then spend on adding value to their customers,” says Newbury-Smith.

These are the types of questions she’d put to scaling businesses: “What are the processes that are really repeatable that are time-consuming? Where can we use the technology to take the stress off you, so that you can concentrate on running your business?”

Beyond the contact centre

Zoom’s expansion beyond the video call also includes a move into workplace management software.

“This is my favourite part of the Zoom platform on a personal level,” says Newbury-Smith.

The platform lets companies manage their assets in an open and interactive way. So a cartoon-like visual interface on a screen shows which colleagues have booked particular desks, which meeting rooms are taken or which car park spaces are free.

It has also integrated Workvivo into this system, a tool which functions as a kind of social intranet for employees, following an acquisition in 2023. It brought with it the tool Seer, which performs regular, staff-customisable engagement surveys to check on employee wellbeing, allowing leaders “to have a pulse check on what's happening in the workforce”, says Newbury-Smith.

The PM calls

Zoom’s reputation for customer video calls was brought to attention recently by new prime minister Andy Burnham. He pointed out in an interview that young people might be at a disadvantage in the job market when being forced to do interviews by Zoom or Teams.

What did Newbury-Smith make of that surprise intervention?

“My thoughts on that are that it’s not about the tool that you're using or the method that you're using for an interview,” says Newbury-Smith, “it's the environment that you set up for the candidate.

“So whether you're on a Zoom call or you're in an in-person meeting, it's your responsibility as the interviewer to put that person in a position where they're relaxed and they can really show themselves.

“Quite often I'll say [when I’m interviewing], especially if I can see it's a young person very new in their career, ‘It's my responsibility to put you at ease’, because then they know it's not on them anymore. It's like a shared responsibility.”

Remote interviews by video call can also cut down on travel expenses for young people if they are doing multiple applications, she points out. They can stop geographical constraints from narrowing their career horizons.

What can leaders learn from Zoom?

Never stop reinventing, even after breakthrough success. Zoom became a verb during the pandemic but half a decade on, the company is determined to make sure that the brand won’t be defined by video calls alone.

Invest as much in existing customers as in winning new ones. Newbury-Smith’s customer success team drives “pull through to other areas of the platform” by proactively showing customers what else is possible, rather than waiting for them to find it themselves.

Automate the predictable, humanise the unpredictable. Zoom’s work with a dairy company shows the principle in action: identity verification and rebooking were fully automated, freeing staff to “spend on adding value to their customers”.

Focus on the environment, not just the tool. Responding to the prime minister’s comments on video interviews, Newbury-Smith argues it’s the interviewer’s responsibility, not the platform, to put candidates at ease, whatever method is used.