How Zoom optimized its digital experience during explosive, 10x growth
Imagine what it’s like to go from a few million weekly visitors to hundreds of millions of weekly visitors in a matter of weeks. Think of all the important customer experiences you would need to improve to meet people’s high digital expectations.
In February 2020, Zoom had millions of weekly visitors to their site, all of whom were coming to Zoom.us to do a handful of activities. Flashforward a month later to March, and Zoom’s traffic spiked to tens of millions of visitors every week. Those visitors arrived to not only use Zoom for a couple of work calls per week, but to entirely reinvent how they interacted with colleagues, partners, teachers, students, and even friends and family.
Zoom used this opportunity to transform its users’ experience into incredible growth and customer happiness across geographies and verticals. How did they do it?
At Opticon ’23, Alex London, Head of Digital Zoom and Jay Dettling, CEO of Hero Digital, joined Alex Atzberger, CEO, Optimizely to share how Zoom re-built their entire digital ecosystem.
Keep reading to learn how Zoom partnered with Hero Digital and Optimizely to transform its customer experience and drive stellar results including these early wins:
- Page load improved by 60%
- Speed to market improved by 50%
- Conversion improvement of 10%
- Publishing time from days to minutes (reduced by about half)
The year the world “Hopped on a Zoom Call” — and what came next
In March 2020, Zoom watched as web traffic, sign-ups, users and attendees grew from millions to hundreds of millions virtually overnight. Not only did its customer base and user group skyrocket, but its core use cases did, too: online meeting rooms were now used to host weddings, game nights, and math classes. At the same time, corporate brainstorms, sales calls, and even government processes requiring the highest security clearances moved to Zoom to continue working as normally as possible.
To meet the incredible demand for new use cases and services, the Zoom team had to ideate, test, and ship new products and features on a timeline that the internal teams refer to as “at the speed of Zoom.” Their success meant that their brand entered a hallowed hall of exclusive brands whose names made the transition from noun to verb. It was the year of: “Can we Zoom?”
Getting there wasn’t just about building and launching products and features; that was only half the battle. To scale and continue delivering happiness to customers, the team needed to ensure they told the story of Zoom across all customer touchpoints.
Their goals:
- Reimagine and rebuild the entire digital stack (including attribution models, analytics systems, acquisition, and localization)
- Move from an existing agnostic, one-size-fits-all model to a global, flexible digital experience to cater to personas, geographies, and use cases
- Improve their speed to market to continue moving “at the speed of Zoom”
The tactical challenges of reimagining Zoom’s digital stack
Zoom’s overarching goal was to put the story at every single touchpoint of the customer journey. Given the dramatic change in their business, building a new site for Zoom would be incredibly complicated. Yet, if they succeeded, they’d generate demand, better enable purchases, and support its users.
So how did they do it? Before making the leap, they looked to their strategic partners -- Hero Digital and Optimizely.
Zoom needed a new digital foundation to achieve all of its goals at scale. More importantly, their new foundation needed to untangle serious web traffic complexity.
Zoom has four primary visitor types -- all arriving on Zoom’s marketing website by the millions. They include:
- Individuals and SMEs buying Zoom online
- Demo requests
- Product support requests
- Users and attendees accessing Zoom’s website as part of their workflow
To add even more complexity, the teams needed to account for multi-lingual requirements for 20+ languages across the globe.
“How do we build for these four levels of complexity? And how quickly can we move to tell our new platform story?” - Alex London, Head of Digital at Zoom
Before anything else, Zoom needed to build a new design system, and Hero Digital stepped in to help. Together, they built a minimum versatile component library that would scale across the website, mobile, ads, and anywhere else Zoom encountered customers. The initial minimum library featured 38 components with 29 variants and 8 page templates.
Zoom also had to untangle the domain and subdomain issues of their own making. The past choice to build their digital foundation on ‘Zoom.us’ and create new subdomains for customers (coming in north of 10k subdomains) meant speed and ranking were complicated. Essentially, Zoom was competing with 10k+ sites that Zoom itself had created.
Resolving this problem by choosing to unify content on a single domain, Zoom, Hero Digital, and Optimizely got to work.
Hero Digital’s foundation + Optimizely’s architecture = moving at the speed of Zoom
By partnering with Hero Digital and Optimizely, Zoom reimagined its complete customer experience and upgraded to a best-in-class technology platform that combines AI-accelerated workflows with experiment-driven digital experiences.
The team deployed the Optimizely Digital Experience Platform, featuring Optimizely Content Management System, Content Management Platform, and Experimentation, as the architecture to bring their foundation to life and scale faster than they could ever imagine.
Component library + Optimizely CMS
One of Zoom’s goals was to move from its existing agnostic model to a global, flexible digital experience to cater to personas, geographies, and use cases. To do that, they needed a modern content management system.
In the first phase of the build, the team focused on Zoom’s marketing site, now untangled but still over 200 pages. They established a foundation on Optimizely’s Content Management System to create a foundation with a migration plan over months.
Even in the earliest stages, the results were huge because the CMS meant Zoom can could now push global changes in just minutes. They save hundreds of hours of work across the company by:
- Eliminating the devops processes, which previously took days or weeks to work through
- Reducing publishing processes by half even with new added governance steps
Optimizely’s Content Marketing Platform
Improving speed to market was Zoom’s third goal. With the first two goals unlocked by their phased migration to Optimizely’s CMS, they needed to not only unblock the velocity but also the creativity and collaboration in producing new content. Zoom’s teams receive 80-100 requests a week for new content across their digital properties.
For Zoom, the re-build of the intake process for content requests was a key component of speeding up their processes. They built in guard rails and governance processes that when used within the CMP, reduced publishing time to minutes rather than days.
Now, with the first three goals— a reimagined digital stack, a flexible digital experience, and improved speed to market—accomplished, Zoom will focus on its next digital phase: experimentation and personalization.
How could a digital experience platform help you navigate the next phase of your business? Learn more from the experts with access to The Forrester Wave: Digital Experience Platforms, Q4 2023 report.
