ZOOM International announced the ZOOM Omnichannel Search Engine. Available to ZOOM customers today, it is an industry-first for continuous contact center improvement in an omnichannel world. By placing a search engine at the core of the ZOOM product suite and architecture, the company is reinventing how contact centers-large and small-capture, analyze and improve customer and agent experiences as well as customer support processes and applications.

Frost & Sullivan projects that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as a key brand differentiator. Forrester found that customer experience leaders grow revenue at a 17 percent compound annual growth rate, whereas laggards only grow 3 percent. An Aberdeen report entitled “Omni-Channel Customer Care” found that within the top-performers:

• 85 percent conduct regular training of customer care agents in the handling of omnichannel communications, compared with 66 percent among the other respondents
• 77 percent store customer contact data across multiple channels, compared with 48 percent
• 69 percent identify topics repeatedly addressed by customers across channels to find where communications need to be improved in specific channels, compared with 42 percent

To achieve this level of performance, contact centers need WFO technology that makes continuous contact center improvement easier and more automated. Through connectors and APIs, search engines bring in all types of customer and agent experience meta-data, embracing omnichannel media capture for call audio meta-data, chat and email. With search-driven UI, saved searches and text-based highlighting, managers can easily find and quickly analyze omnichannel interactions in a few mouse clicks. ZOOM’s search technology also prioritizes where quality improvements can and should be made. No other data-driven WFO application can deliver these benefits to contact centers in the same way.

“We designed a cloud-native search engine for next-generation, data-driven contact centers and smarter WFO applications,” said Brian Shore, chief executive officer at ZOOM International. “With ZOOM’s search capabilities, contact centers can access more varieties and volumes of data with greater effectiveness and speed. At the end of the day, this technology improves the customer experience across channels and in turn delivers better business outcomes in contact center operations.”

ZOOM Omnichannel Search Engine provides a foundation for companies to address one of the most challenging and important contact center metrics-first contact resolution (FCR). FCR is challenging because siloed, time-based interaction data must be captured and integrated, then prioritized. Search engines are purpose-built to capture, correlate, analyze and prioritize a myriad of structured and unstructured data from any type of device or interaction over time-these capabilities play strongly towards the evolution of FCR. Traditional databases, data warehouses and CRM systems aren’t designed to manage this type of data as effectively.

In contrast, ZOOM Omnichannel Search Engine delivers from ten to 100 times more speed and scale on ten to 100 times more data versus traditional databases and data warehouses. In-house tests show that common queries on customer interaction data with a traditional database can take 5 or more minutes, but those exact same queries with ZOOM take just seconds.

With omnichannel search technology, ZOOM’s entire product suite captures, analyzes and improves customer interactions more effectively than any other vendor in ZOOM’s industry and sector. ZOOM collects a wide spectrum of interactions-CRM, customer surveys, audio and video metadata, computer screens, email, chat and collaboration. There is a growing set of APIs to record SMS, social media, internet of things, IVRs, cloud integration services and more.