Zoomin CEO explains how ‘the most boring content’ can help companies improve their CX
It’s the part of many customer experiences we all hate: that moment you have something about a product you need to figure out so desperately you find yourself either calling for support or — worse — searching endlessly on Google for the online equivalent of an owner’s manual.
New York-based Zoomin is attempting to offer an alternative to both those options, in part by using information a company already has about its products and making it more readily available via self-service portals.
Selected as one of the firms in Oracle’s Startup Cloud Accelerator three years ago, Zoomin has seen its core technology platform, which it calls knowledge orchestration, become even more relevant since the pandemic. As more companies shift to a digital-first strategy, some of them also struggle to have their service teams keep up with increased customer outreach.
Zoomin works with customers such as McAfee and Cisco to take large volumes of technical content and automatically ingest it through its software. This can be turned into a content hub, where customers can look up their own answers to problems and have personalized responses to their questions. The portals also serve as a mechanism to capture voice of the customer-type feedback about needs and wants, according to Zoomin CEO Gal Oron.
“What people want is an experience like Netflix, basically,” Oron told 360 Magazine, referring to the streaming service’s ease of use, search and recommendation capabilities. “As a company, we look at the most boring asset everybody has, and for us, it’s gold.”
Oron said Zoomin’s source material can include everything from knowledge articles to community discussion threads and details from a service desk ticket. The technology continues to ingest information to power its content hubs, which can be set up in a matter of weeks in some cases.
“You do not want to send them outside the product, because you don’t know if they’ll ever come back,” he said, adding that while the idea of such hubs isn’t new, Zoomin has made it turnkey to set them up. “This used to be a project — an IT project with lots of different stakeholders that would have to get involved.”
While other areas of CX can be difficult to quantify in terms of ROI, Oron said Zoomin has seen some customers achieve an 17 per cent improvement in Net Promoter Score (NPS), as well as improved customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores. From a resource standpoint, meanwhile, he cited customers that have experienced a 40 per cent boost in the number of cases deflected from customer service teams, allowing agents to focus on more challenging or urgent tickets.
Brands that embrace self-service should also remember that those moments are an opportunity to continue generating demand for sales, Oron said. A company using one of its content hubs, for instance, can include calls to action within support documentation that turn to highly effective leads.
“All customers are also prospects,” he said. “When you engage someone who’s already trying to answer questions about your product, a lead doesn’t get more qualified than that.”
