Intelligent contact center software firm Z21 Labs Inc., better known as Observe.AI, said today it’s integrating its conversation intelligence capabilities with Zoom Video Communications Inc.’s new contact center offering.

With the integration, companies that use Zoom Contact Center to handle customer service operations will benefit from a range of artificial intelligence-powered insights into their customer interactions that can improve experiences, revenue and retention.

Observe.AI is a well-funded creator of intelligent call center software that helps human operators with customer services tasks. Under the hood are AI-based natural language processing algorithms that help to analyze conversations between agents and customers.

The software can also transcribe each call and use sentiment analysis to estimate each caller’s satisfaction level, enabling companies to glean key insights that can be used to train call center staff and improve customer service experiences. For instance, the best-performing call center agents can be used as benchmarks to determine what works. Then, companies can use this information to train new and underperforming staff.

Zoom launched its cloud-based Contact Center platform earlier this year. The new offering was created to extend the company’s reach into the enterprise and generate additional revenue growth after its earlier pandemic-driven boom began to wane. It combines unified communications and contact center services with the unique usability of Zoom’s platform to support use cases such as video and voice calls, with SMS, web chat and social media messaging capabilities also available.

Given Zoom’s pedigree in video calls, Zoom Contact Center is pretty comprehensive on the communications side, but conversation analytics is not necessarily the company’s strong point, so it makes sense to partner with a specialist such as Observe.AI.

Observe.AI said that economic uncertainty has forced many brands to double down on customer experience to retain an edge and keep existing customers satisfied. As such, their contact centers are required to handle higher-value, more complex customer interactions that can improve loyalty and retention.

That’s where Zoom Contact Center and Observe.AI think they can make a difference. Conversation intelligence can help to enrich each agent’s performance and improve training, leading to more satisfying customer experiences.

“Zoom Contact Center is built for flexibility and efficiency, empowering users with the right tools to address complex enquiries and deliver deeper engagement,” said Kentis Gopalla, head of ecosystem for Zoom Phone and Contact Center. “When combined with Observe.AI, managers can derive insights from conversations, evaluate agent performance, and deliver contextual feedback.”

Liz Miller of Constellation Research Inc. said Zoom’s decision to integrate with Observe.AI mirrors what many of its rivals in the contact center business, such as Five9 Inc., RingCentral Inc., Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc. are doing, merging conversational AI with their communications platforms. She said organizations have become keenly aware that human agents can only access, retain and juggle so much information, so they can do with a helping hand.

“Conversational AI is an exceptional way to quickly understand and aggregate insights into everything from a customer’s immediate context to their previous engagements,” Miller said. “It provides call center agents with immediate insights and information, and even automated workflows to achieve the best possible outcome. Zoom’s strategy has been to create meaningful strategic partnerships while building out a robust ecosystem, and it seems to be paying off. This ecosystem translates into an ability to accelerate at will. Organizations using its platform will have the capacity to scale the moment they are ready to do so.”

Photo: Zoom