We believe that Workforce Management (WFM) can and should be an intuitive and easy process that contributes to employee engagement while supporting an exemplary customer experience
Bill Devlin, Chief Technology Officer at ZOOM International joined the company over two years ago, eager to learn more about one of the best kept secrets in the contact center world. Customers and partners alike have been intimately aware of the fantastic suite of software ZOOM International offers for well over a decade. Those same partners and customers have also experienced ZOOM International’s obsession with serving the needs of others, the reputation for which is backed by a trailing 365-day NPS of 87.
ZOOM International exists to elevate every customer encounter for contact centers. Their software captures customer sentiment at the point of contact, providing actionable insights for elevating customer experience, optimizing agent effectiveness and maintaining compliance. No other Workspace Environment Management (WEM) software provides a full 360-degree view of omni-channel interactions, survey results, customer sentiment and quality reviews in a single place the way ZOOM International does. They serve over 2200 customers and partners worldwide, ranging from sub-100 agent contact centers to brands like Amerigas, IBM, Homecredit, Finansbank, Tata Sky, Generali, Allianz, and Vodafone spanning 90 Countries.
Upon arrival, Bill dove right in and found himself surrounded by a group of wonderfully talented human beings, the likes of which (he can honestly say) are quite a rare find. He quickly learned that ZOOM International was a company deploying its solutions predominantly on-premise. “Yes, on-premise! One of the tasks entrusted to me by the board of directors was to ‘future proof’ ZOOM International and create a flexible, extensible platform to power ZOOM International customers and partners moving forward,” adds Bill. “We investigated the market, cloud offerings, trends in technology, best practices in engineering, and performed some deep introspection with our customers and partners.” One thing was made abundantly clear; cloud is the future, but it is not only a place to host, it’s a set of design patterns, technology, practices and processes for building, deploying, managing and maintaining software. The true definition of a cloud platform became the answer to the primary question posed to Bill when he was hired: ZOOM International needed one codebase, on one platform, deployable anywhere.
Creating Magic!
From that day on ZOOM International’s small software outfit with a shoestring budget (miniscule in contrast to others who share the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WEM) began a journey toward a native cloud platform. Bill and his team’s goal was to deliver a single native cloud platform to all of the customers in one codebase with all the benefits attached: scalability, reliability, elasticity, continuous integration, delivery, flexibility and extensibility. “We also needed to fully embrace modern architecture principles and refactor our existing monolithic software architecture to microservices without adversely affecting our on-premise customer base,” says Bill. “We needed to deliver the new platform without a dependency on unique PaaS and SaaS requirements for major cloud providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft to which many other vendors are beholden.” Abstracting those components would make ZOOM International fully portable and more customer friendly. Bill and his team also wanted to achieve abstraction with an iterative and incremental approach, so that existing customers would not be required to perform large painful upgrades to hardware and could inherit the amazing benefits with minimal impact.
Fast forward to today. ZOOM International announced Elevēo (pronounced: eh·luh·vey·o) as the product brand name for their native cloud platform and WFM product to the market. Elevēo is not a new company name, it is simply ZOOM’s software elevated into a native cloud platform and products under a new brand. Like all things at ZOOM International chose a new name to help keep things simple for their customers—(Elevēo is the new platform and ZOOM is the existing one).
The company’s on-premise customers already enjoy some benefits from Kubernetes, docker, Prometheus and Grafana, to name a few, as part of our 6.4 & 6.5 WFO suite feature releases. The ZOOM International suite is aggressively migrating towards the new Elevēo platform and will soon merge completely into it. Their first full Elevēo platform-based offering is the brand-new workforce management software product: Elevēo WFM, built to simplify scheduling and forecasting.
The Future is here
Before Elevēo, ZOOM International did not possess a proprietary WFM software product, nor any PPU/SaaS base payment options for existing products within their WFO suite. The company made a conscious choice to release this portion of the Elevēo suite on Amazon Web Services as a proof point to the market that their native cloud platform is mature, flexible and fully portable. Elevēo WFM is wholly built on the design principles extolled in this article. In short order ZOOM International’s premise customers will have access to the same features, pricing and functionality in Elevēo WFM on premise. The reason is simple, their new platform is one codebase, one platform, deployable anywhere, and it is the future.
ZOOM International’s new Elevēo WFM product offering targets commercial contact center and back office organizations who are not ready for the level of expense, implementation and complexity required for enterprise level WFM software. For this product Bill and his team focused on simplified workflows, to meet basic requirements for shared scheduling and forecasting with less effort and a pay as you go price without the need to integrate or host the software.
After the WFM launch, ZOOM International’s call recording, quality management, e-learning and other workforce optimization products also began migrating toward the Elevēo platform, creating a flexible, scalable and secure set of products for many years to come. It is pertinent to remember that Elevēo was formed to provide easy to use, results oriented software and expertise for customers who want software that just works. Their products do only what an organization requires in order to get results, are built using modern cloud native technologies and are priced based on how much the customer’s use them. Elevēo products are birthed from ZOOM International with a rich WFO history, award-winning products and reputation for service. “We believe that Workforce Management (WFM) can and should be an intuitive and easy process that contributes to employee engagement while supporting an exemplary customer experience,” elucidates Bill. “We look forward to serving you and helping you elevate every encounter.”
