2023 Customer Awards: Zoom - Best-in-Class: Community

Company: Zoom

Company background: Zoom is an all-in-one intelligent collaboration platform that makes connecting easier, more immersive, and more dynamic for businesses and individuals. Zoom technology puts people at the center, enabling meaningful connections, facilitating modern collaboration, and driving human innovation through solutions like team chat, phone, meetings, omnichannel cloud contact center, smart recordings, whiteboard, and more, in one offering.

Contact: Briuana Green

Title: Community Moderator

Related URLs: https://community.zoom.com/, https://zoom.us/, https://support.zoom.us/

Kudos Category: Best-in-Class: Community

1. Describe the organization's objectives in launching a Khoros community. What is the use-case and purpose of your community (support, enablement and learning, marketing awareness, customer success, driving sales, product innovation, etc.)? Has the community charter evolved since its launch, and if so, how?

In 2020 when the global pandemic hit, Zoom's usage exponentially increased. Customers wanted an online support forum available 24/7. In March 2021, the Zoom Community team was brought on to build Zoom’s online self-service support forum. Leveraging the use of the Khoros Community and Care technologies, the team deployed the Zoom Community within five months, in August 2021. 

In less than two years since its launch, the Zoom Community has provided a wealth of knowledge to all global Zoom users. The community has grown to include over 250,000 community members, more than 100,000 posts, 20 million page views, and 10 million visits. 

The Community’s primary purpose is made up of the below three foundational pillars: 

The Zoom Community provides users with a place to find answers, seek support, and receive guidance from fellow Zoom subject matter experts. Users can explore our product forums to find trending topics, pre-existing solutions, and creative use cases. 

Community members can feel empowered with worldwide support to connect with like-minded individuals, enhance their knowledge, and discover innovative solutions. Contributions are provided from our diverse group of devoted Zoom Community Champions, Zoom Partners, Zoom Employees, and fellow Zoom users who are passionate about Zoom’s brand and products. 

How the Zoom Community charter has evolved: 

Since its launch in 2021, the Zoom Community has undergone a remarkable evolution marked by exponential year-over-year growth, exceptional collaborative discussions, industry accolades, and the influential Zoom Community Champion Program.

Year-Over-Year Growth

As the Zoom Community closely approaches its two-year anniversary, the substantial amount of growth that has taken place in such a short amount of time is unmatched. In reflecting back on this past year, the year-over-year growth has significantly increased across our key success metrics: 

Awards and Recognition:

Over the past year, the remarkable evolution and expansion of the Zoom Community has brought us immense pride as we garnered recognition from our industry peers for the success of this vibrant space. It stands as a testament to our commitment to fostering connections and creating an unparalleled experience for our users worldwide.

The Zoom Community was honored to receive the 2022 Khoros Kudos Award in the Keep Calm and Carry On category. We were also a finalist in the Rookie of the Year category.

Alexis Brown, Senior Manager of Global Community at Zoom, was recognized for our efforts as the recipient of the 2023 CMX Award for Executive Leader of a Community Team.

Community Champion Program:

The Zoom Community Champion Program was created to recognize and celebrate our most exceptional community members who have made significant contributions and demonstrated outstanding leadership within the community. The Zoom Community Champion Program was open to employees in June 2021 and began welcoming customers and partners in August 2022.    

Today, our Community Champions are a diverse group of 150+ Zoom customers, Zoom employees, and Zoom partners who work collaboratively to deliver happiness throughout the community. Their dedication and contributions are reflected through the impact they have made just in the number of replies and solutions provided alone. 

By providing valuable solutions and sharing product expertise and success stories, champions are delivering an unparalleled community experience that keeps our customers coming back.

To the Community team, it is important that we acknowledge, honor, and celebrate the impactful contributions that our Community Champions make. We provide our champions with:

• Digital rewards such as yearly badges
• Digital certifications to show off on their social channels
• An invitation to our exclusive monthly Community Champion calls, where they get to meet directly with the Zoom Community team and Zoom employee champions
• A Zoom Community branded “welcome” gift (and we like to throw in quarterly surprise and delight gifts as well 😉) 

   

• Access to our private Community Champion forum and Zoom Chat Champion Chat Channels

Collaborative Discussions

The Zoom Community started as a self-service support channel for customers to seek support. While this still remains its primary foundational use case, the quality of collaborative discussions and questions we are seeing in the community supported by the number of solutions has exceeded expectations. Not only are we seeing what we expected to occur in such a place - support-related questions and answers, but the level of passion for our products, shared unique use cases, and the exchange of expert knowledge is what has really helped evolve our community. Zoom has prided itself in prioritizing happiness for our customers.

As the Zoom Community approaches its two-year milestone, it has not only experienced exceptional growth in numbers, but has also exceeded expectations in terms of the quality of discussions, knowledge sharing, and customer support solutions. The community thrives by providing invaluable insights and expertise, bringing happiness to our customers worldwide, and being recognized for its impact by leaders in the community industry.

2. How did the community get brought to life? Was there executive/business/stakeholder buy-in? What was the process to gain this buy-in? How was cross-functional support and organizational adoption achieved?

Delivering happiness is at the core foundation of our business. Bringing to life an online community that provides helpful solutions to our customers has been continuously supported by Zoom’s senior leadership and global teams.

When Zoom experienced astronomical growth in 2020 due to the global pandemic, there was a greater need for more reliance on self-service. At the time, there was no dedicated online community for global Zoom users to receive free, 24/7 support. To better serve the needs of the ever-growing customer base and aid in their happiness with using Zoom, the Zoom Community was born. 

The business understands the key impact of the community. The more conversations with helpful solutions, the more people can benefit from viewing these posts and finding the answer they are looking for. In turn, more support deflection can occur, freeing up our live agents to assist with high severity issues and premier accounts. 

While the heartbeat of the Zoom Community is reflected through the questions asked and answers received, the adoption of cross-functional support has expanded our use cases and programs within the forum. Collaboration across several organizations including marketing, customer success, product management, customer support, and engineering have all taken a seat at the table to engage in the community and take key learnings from the wealth of discussions. 

The combination of seeing the direct impact of support deflection, insightful trends, and the purest form of happiness delivered, the community has continued to be supported by the business. 

3. What were the results? More revenue generated, a reduction of costs, improved customer experience, more innovation, etc.? Tell us how Khoros helped you achieve those results. Please include quantifiable metrics if possible.

Prior to the launch of the Zoom Community, many Zoom users did not have the ability to seek self-service support aside from Zoom’s knowledge base. Because of the Zoom Community, users have direct access to support from actual Zoom users and Zoom employees. The results generated by the Zoom Community have been phenomenal and far-reaching.

The Zoom Community is accomplishing what we hoped it would do, which is allowing customers to freely exchange their wealth of knowledge through community discussions. Over the past year, we have seen an improvement in key metrics, such as an increase in views, which indicates that community users are finding the solutions that initially encouraged them to seek support in the community. Thus, the need to create new discussions is diminished. Zoom Community users can browse through the different columns in our Recent Activity feed to stay up-to-date on the latest trending posts and posts that already have an accepted solution. One of the most useful things about community platforms is that posts continue to live on. For example, a solution that was posted in 2021 will continue to benefit users in 2023 and beyond who have a similar question to the original poster. 

Zoom was drawn to Khoros by its outstanding features and scalability, which perfectly catered to larger user bases such as Zoom’s. The Zoom Community team utilizes Khoros Communities and Khoros Care, and they have been particularly instrumental in the success of the community. The user-friendly interface, extensive integrations, powerful gamification, and advanced analytics offered by Khoros Communities help us keep users coming back.  In essence, Khoros Communities proved to be the best-in-class solution that Zoom needed to efficiently scale our community at a rapid pace. Furthermore, Khoros Care has allowed our community team to effectively moderate the thousands of discussions happening in the community every month and ensure customers are satisfied with the help they receive in the Zoom Community. 

Special Thanks: N/A

Case Study Opt-In: Yes