From ‘You’re on Mute’ to ‘We’re All In’: A Fireside Chat on Zoom’s Community Glow-Up

All right, well, I get to go from that introduction to another set of introductions. I'm going to bring up on stage Alexis Brown and Jeff Harling. [Applause] I'm sure you all be shocked to hear that they both work at Zoom, and so I'm going to let them introduce themselves. Maybe we'll start with you, Alexis.

Yeah, hi everyone. Happy to be here and excited to talk about all things community. I feel like there's not too many sessions on community today, so I feel kind of privileged to have that. But yeah, Alexis Brown, I joined Zoom a little over five years ago, and I'm excited to share our journey with you guys.

Wonderful. And Jeff? Jeff Harling, I joined Zoom just about six years ago, right in the middle of the pandemic. I had a storm, it was perfect timing, obviously, to join a company that was kind of upstart, you know, right through the ravages of COVID, but I run digital support for Zoom, as well as our billing and account management support teams.

We'll talk more about what digital support means, but it's a pretty all-encompassing area of Zoom. Well, wonderful. Nice to be here. Thank you, guys.

Lovely to have you both. We really appreciate you taking the time here today. Where's our fire? Sorry, we don't have a fire.

It's not a fireside chat. The lights blinding us, those will be our area. I should point out, though, we are bribing you guys for being here. We brought a whole pile of Zoom swags, so anybody that asks a question can visit the prize table up here.

It's unique, one-of-a-kind Zoom swag, so you're not going to find it anywhere else. So encouraging questions. Good stuff. Think of your questions now.

Well, let's jump in. And, Jeff, you kind of mentioned this. I think the Zoom community story is particularly interesting if we think back to 2020, right? We're thinking, "Oop, I clicked one too many.

Let's do this." So if we think back to 2020, the pandemic had just hit, Zoom adoption skyrocketed. My grandma knew what Zoom was all of a sudden. So what was it like to join Zoom at that point in time? I have to imagine.

Well, thank you, Grandma, for being a customer. I have to say, you know, clearly, 2020 is no surprise to any of you guys. It was kind of a bizarre yet nuts world for us. When I joined Zoom in 2020, there was no-- we had no digital support practice at all.

There was no community. There was no real practice around how we can help customers to collaborate and self-solve. Rolling into March, the Zoom support organization, we managed about 10,000 to 12,000 tickets a week. The last week of March in 2020, our unassigned queue sat at a million tickets, over a million tickets.

So we went from this, you know, kind of small, about 100-person support organization to an organization that honestly couldn't manage what we had in front of us. Our customers were coming at us in droves, new customers, of course, and nobody had heard of Zoom before March of 2020, and now suddenly, it was a household name within a couple of weeks, even. So it was a very unique experience for us, as you can imagine. I joke with folks in my organization that, you know, probably there'll be case studies written about, you know, Zoom and Amazon and some of the companies that really experienced this magnificent growth in a very short period of time.

But we didn't have a lot of the capabilities that we needed to have. So when the pandemic started, people came at us, we were not prepared for that. So I think that really, we talk about the curves that were showing on the slide a moment ago. We trailed where we needed to be.

And I'm like, I can't see what's going on here. It's not sticking, sorry, for whatever reason, it keeps wanting to progress. So the other one, yeah, that one, it's right there. Snapshot.

So we trailed really what we needed to, where we needed to be from a customer perspective. And had we had this collaboration space, had we had the self-service tracks laid down, had we had a real practice to meet our customers where they were, when COVID happened, it would have been a much different experience. It wouldn't have been a million tickets. It would have been something significantly smaller and probably a much smoother experience for everyone that was, you know, found themselves at home from Friday to Monday, suddenly working in a different environment.

So that was a dramatic difference for us. But we're gonna talk about kind of like how we got there and with a lot of help from someone that is up here on the stage with me, as I was building this organization, I was one of one when I came in. And so, you know, I had to find people that were experts in the space to build out digital support and build out what is a community from get go. And that's where we bring in Alexis.

Wonderful, Alexis, maybe we'll kind of throw that to you. Jeff brings you on board. How quickly did you have to move? I would imagine pretty quick.

Yeah, so if you go to the next slide, so basically, you know, Jeff, I asked Jeff day one. I said, you want me to build a community? Well, what's the goal? I'm not just gonna build any community.

I need to understand the goal behind it. And his goal, his answer then, as well as if you asked him right now today, it's support deflection. And so with that, knowing that the goal was to provide a self-service forum where users could ask questions and get answers as efficiently as possible, human to human, peer to peer interaction, I was able and fortunate enough to have a leadership team. We're just jumping all over the place.

The AV, it keeps clicking for us if you're able to do anything with it. So I was fortunate enough that I had leadership that understood the value of community. We never had to pitch it to them. They more were saying, how quickly can you launch this?

I was given a team of four community managers and we took a very much a crawl, walk, run approach. When you launch a community, you get so excited, right? You think about all the frills, the user groups, the champion programs, the advocacy. And that wasn't something that I was looking at right away.

Right away, we just needed to launch that community that was really gonna serve the purpose of, people can come here, it's user-friendly, they can ask questions and they can find answers. So we took a divide and conquer approach with my four community managers and myself, some people took content management, some people took gamification, admin, user permissions, all the core pillars of what you need to stand up a community. And then we were able to go at really the most rapid speed I'd ever built a community from the ground up. So Jeff said, I signed with a vendor, here's a blank state community, you have a team, how quickly can you go?

And I was like, all right, let's do this challenge accepted. We launched from the day I joined Zoom in March of 2021, we launched in beta in June of 2021. So three months later, we launched in beta. The irony was that when we launched in beta, we thought, okay, we'll send in coordination with our customer success team who are here in the audience.

We said, let's send some emails to some healthcare, some education customers, kind of get our toes wet. But technically the community was open to everyone, we just didn't market it yet. This whole beta concept didn't work for us, everyone wanted to come, so we decided to launch globally two months later, but really it kind of launched globally in June. That's incredible, that it just, like people found it, there was this untapped desire for it.

Yeah, I think Google found it, and there was no keeping it a secret, there was really no keeping it in beta. People, it was a really right place, right time. We didn't even have to sell it to people, they were wanting it and running to it. That's incredible.

One of the things I want to pick up, it's not a question we had on the slide here, but you'd mentioned having that focus. How difficult was it to maintain that focus? Because I have to imagine that temptation of like, we could be everything to everyone, it's got to be high. It was, and I think Jeff knows me very well.

I'm a very, you know, eyes on the prize type of person, and so I just, I've been doing online communities for over a decade, and at that point I just knew the expertise that I had coming in, I knew what we had to stay focused on, keeping to our north star of support deflection, and knowing that I didn't want this just to be an overnight success community, I wanted it to have longevity, and that's where we talk about later in the deck, but that, you know, five years later, switching to a new vendor, we have been so fortunate to continue to tell that success story. It's been such a fun opportunity to watch your community grow and just continue to succeed. I think in that vein, maybe talk to us a little bit about how you've measured that growth across the community over the years. Yeah, absolutely.

So really, you know, if you go to the visual here to show, so, you know, I always kind of preach that community isn't a science, it's an art, right? There's never gonna be one specific KPI, they're gonna be like, that's it, that's how we measure success, you know, close the books, we're done. It's really this combination of all the traditional KPIs that you see kind of on the left-hand side there, you know, the number of solutions, the views, the discussions, the replies, of course, all of that is extremely important, the registered users. But I'm a huge advocate in, you know, so the measure of success is, are people coming to your community, are they continuing to do things on the community?

But another measure of success also is behind the curtains, right? Are there people nourishing this community who have the expertise, who are the community managers, who can make sure that we're prioritizing the trending topics, we're keeping the community safe and respectful? And that's really where we lean on our moderators, our champions, our partners, all really to help tell that success story together. I think that all nicely ties into, when you think about all the people who make up the community, again, going back to that, what is our goal?

Our goal is support deflection. And so we really focus on that one-to-many model. So my biggest, you know, I love to preach this notion in customer support of, we can prove support deflection by how many views, let's say a solution has on a community post, and how many people have viewed that versus just one-to-one support ticket, right? That does help, and it helps our customer support organization prioritize the customer support tickets that our customers pay to have that level of service.

But to help the masses, we've done the math, and one community post that has a solution literally has helped thousands of unique users. That's incredible. That's incredible. I think it's important to point out, if you guys came to the digital success session earlier today, you heard Brian talk about the people-- Powered pillars.

People powered pillars, right? And not to give too much away regarding the success of this, we'll get to that in a few minutes, but you heard Alexis talk about, we were building out those pillars years ago, even before those, that three Ps were cool. So Alexis represents as a leader of this community, she has built this A from scratch, and B to great degree successful based on those people-- People powered pillars. People powered pillars.

Tell Brian to make another talk with him. No kidding, I feel like he needs a trademark, that. So let's get on to the success. Yeah, let's take a look.

Clearly it wants us to talk about this. The Zoom community is five years old, celebrated the five-year anniversary, continues to grow at an incredible pace. What are some of the biggest opportunities for celebration? I'm gonna let Jeff take this one, because he loves to talk about the success of our community.

I do too. Yeah, I am gonna brag a little bit about Alexis, because I think everybody that's running a community needs an Alexis, and someone that is understanding of community from its core. I have built communities, built my first community back in late 90s, using an off the show, right? Yeah, Gen X, yes.

So using an off the show, right? Using an off, literally downloaded off the internet bulletin board platform, and built several communities since then, working for RingCentral and Zendesk and AT&T, et cetera. I have seen communities big and small, but I've never seen one as well run as this. And I think we're gonna talk a little bit about the successes that we've managed to drive there in just five years.

Five years. Already, best community on the planet three times. I mean, like who does that, right? We're about to get to hit a half million registered users.

We were growing at just tens of thousands of users per month in the early days, and it really hasn't slowed down since then, about 60 months of existence that the community's been in place. We've also, in the midst of all that, besides standing up community from scratch, have migrated from another community onto Gainsight, as Alexis said, back in January. And I think you're gonna talk more about that. But anyone that has gone through a community migration, just to keep the sanctity of that champion network, as well as the consistency of the threaded experience for those customers that are there daily, it's a monumental task, a monumental feat, to pull off in any length of time.

But we did it in just a couple of months. So happy to talk to you guys offline. If you wanna roll up here after the session, we can talk more about that experience. And I will say really quick, while you have that side up.

So we do have a QR code. We acknowledge it's very small. But we would love if anyone would like to check out our champion program or join. If anyone signs up right now, kudos to you, you can go pick a swag at him.

So I had an issue with the QR code being so small, just to be honest with you. So anybody from the back row that can hit that QR code from there, you get to hit the prize table. So yeah, but definitely do join. I think it's a vibrant community that continues to grow and thrive.

And when we talk to a lot of other community leaders around this conference, even in just the past 24 hours, we've heard from some that have maybe struggled with their community kind of stagnating or maybe falling off slipping a little bit in this avenue of AI. There's still a lot that can be done. But this community, the Zoom community continues to grow at double digit pace over quarter over quarter. And so that I think is remarkable.

And we're definitely doing, I think I'm bragging, she's doing something right. So again, you all need an Alexis, get your own. She's not, she's not for hire. Sorry.

(laughing) I'll sneak in. I see a question from the audience actually. Yeah. Around staffing that we can ask now, which is how did you determine, I think Alexis you had mentioned four folks on the team.

How had you determined four community managers? Like how did you reach that point of this is the right number for us? So I'm actually gonna let Jeff answer that because I joined March of 2021. And when I joined, he said, and you also have four community managers.

So I actually, kudos, I take that back. I had three and we had one more open head count. But he hired, he picked the perfect team. Yeah, it was a hurry up and hire situation.

When you're given head count, what's the, I mean, my mantra is always run, right? It's because the head count get canceled invariably, there's a change at the CFO level, et cetera. So we allocated, I basically planned out the entire organization, mapped out the number of head count for each pillar. And when I talked about building out digital support, community was a piece of the pie, very important piece of the pie, alongside of a search engine optimization experience, alongside a content and knowledge management experience, alongside a web experience, alongside also a chat bot and AI experience.

All of that makes up our digital support organization and community being obviously a key pillar of that. So I had all of the head count mapped out for each of the pillars and I got almost all of it approved. And so I literally was just firing in every direction, hiring any warm body that knew community, going for the best talent, of course. But clearly you landed.

Clearly I won. So we got a full team staff and Alexis walked in the door on day one with a team standing there, also brand new to the business on day one. Wonderful. Well, I see one more audience question before we talk about kind of the switch that y'all went through, which is what do you do with some of the data from your community?

How does it feed back into your product or to your support experience for that matter? Yeah. So community, just like a knowledge base, if you guys have seen some of the other presentations you've heard over and over again that in the advent of AI, the content is king or queen. Content is the blood in the bloodstream of any AI model.

And we also see community as being a potential for a knowledge enablement as well, for enabling our LLMs to make them smarter or answer better. There's a capability that exists with that community curated responses that give us not just the answers to the solutions that we're looking for, answers to the questions that our customers are looking for, but also a diversity of responses that can sometimes address unique customer needs that we don't in the support organization. So for my knowledge management practice, for that team, they're addressing what are the common issues, common call drivers, how do I close the gap for those knowledge articles. But community gives us the what if kind of experiences.

And so it allows us to kind of vary the response, to say it's not always an A to B kind of path, which is what the knowledge base article says. Sometimes it's an A with a side trip integration to something else that gives us yet a unique solution. And that's where community I think is empowering us to be better at responding to our customers. Wonderful.

Okay, well, let's talk about this last year. So in early 2025, you all switched platforms over to GainSight. Talk to us a little bit about that experience, what some of the features were. Alexis, apparently you're addicted to speed, doing things very, very quickly.

Talk to us about that process. Yeah, can you just do one more little click? There we go. Yeah, absolutely.

So it was kind of serendipitous. We had been on another vendor for about four years and our contract was ending. And we were in the market, we wanted something new, we wanted something more vibrant, more refreshed. And I think with that, I've been doing communities for a long time, I did community as consulting too.

So I was very hyper aware of what was out there. I knew what we didn't want, and that made it easier to know what we wanted. And so with that, GainSight was a clear choice. It checked the majority of boxes that I want.

I will admit, I always joke I'm such a fan girl of Erika Cole, so I was like, I'll follow her anywhere. If she's with GainSight, you got me sold. But so with that being said, moving to GainSight, we really saw an opportunity for a few different things. We, Zoom moves very fast, and we love to change the look and feel of our brand.

And we needed a more robust platform that could keep up with that. So the first one that I pride myself off of, and I have to give all the kudos to our dev team, and I have a designer on my team for just giving us a much more vibrant, beautiful community. When you go to the homepage, I'm a big advocate of you only have one chance to give a first impression, and I want when people come to our community to really be wowed and feel like this is a vibrant, helpful, user-friendly space. So in choosing GainSight, that was the first thing, is I absolutely love the customizations that we could do, user-friendly for us, in terms of I myself could customize it if I want, and the whole vibe coding thing, but also could tap my much more skilled dev team to come in and customize as much as we wanted.

I think the other piece too was, at the time that we started evaluating, which admittedly was more kind of in the fall, I really hadn't seen a lot of communities be using AI, and I know the next question we'll talk about that too, but GainSight really sold me on all the AI capabilities that we could be implementing into the community, and I admittedly felt very behind. It was like, we are using nothing, nothing. AI related on our previous vendor, on our previous platform, and so I quickly saw all these opportunities of rebrand, implementation of AI, and all of that helping with faster answers, scalable support, less manual moderation work, more proactive, human-centered community. I wanna add, between the two of us, we've got probably a good solid 30-plus years of experience in building communities out, maybe 40, I don't know, I've had mid-ages here.

But I think Alexis and I, we both independently had looked at other forums, Vanilla, we had looked at, even going back to Jive and Lithium Days, ServiceNow community, Zendesk community, competitors to GainSight, name it, Rimes was Chamorros. We had looked at all of the communities, and we really found that GainSight just gave us the ability that we needed, and to her point around AI, clearly AI is the conversation of the day, and that I think was the tipping point for us for sure. Yeah. What about coming out the other side of that migration process?

I know there are folks potentially in the room that are looking at various platforms, platform aside, totally agnostic, what was the biggest takeaway that you all learned going through that migration process of such a large and already successful community? Oh my gosh, that's such a loaded question, wow. Thrown me on curveball there. I mean, gosh, I think just it honestly took me back to that original notion of our community.

What is our goal? What have we been successful at in our community today? And I was so passionate about holding onto those things when we migrated, right? So it was kind of like a, you know, I think I was pretty stern with you guys on the GainSight side of like, this has to be migrated, and if you don't have a apples to apples solution, you kind of need to figure it out for us.

And you guys did such a wonderful job at doing that, and that's where I really, it kind of, you know, solidified my decision of moving to GainSight and knowing that the core functionality of the community, what exactly do we need for our users, the ability to easily find content, ask questions, robust search, have answers, all the core capabilities of a community is what we needed to migrate over, and those boxes were checked. There were certainly customizations we'd done on our previous platform that we had to kind of say, okay, these aren't gonna be brought over, but I was okay with that because it was such a fast migration, and those were things that, again, were more of like the frills, the bells and whistles that I knew-- The heart of your community. Exactly, and we're rebuilding them now, so that's okay. Wonderful.

Okay, well, I'm pretty sure we have hit a Pulse record. It's taken us 30 minutes to talk about AI. I don't know that any session has gone that long today before talking through it, so let's talk about AI. How is AI reshaping your community?

I have to imagine there's so many different impacts that you all are thinking through right now. Yes, I feel like I have to be very careful because I know everyone's on the edge of their seat waiting for my answer here. No, so really, I take the approach with AI in regards to how can AI help us bring humans together more, right? The community is all about that human to human connection, and I don't think that that's going away.

We've been very privileged, at least in our community, to see three months after-- That's okay. We're just like, okay, three months after we launched on Gainsight, we've continued to actually see increased year-over-year participation from when we looked at, obviously, last year to this year, that three-month comparison, and that really tells us the story, right? With Zoom, customers still want a place that they can ask a question and have a real human answer it. And so, with that being said, how I have been very excited to utilize the functionalities of Gainsight's community AI functionality is to help with efficiencies with that human to human interaction.

So a couple of examples of that. So one is the AI moderation, the AI Modbot. Oh my goodness. So we had nothing like that before.

We had my community management team all day, every day, vetting all the spam content that we get into our community, all the inappropriate content. And I don't wanna call it wasting time, but just spending so many hours out there day, that was like a full-time job. Well now, we did the numbers, and 92% of our content is vetted by the AI Modbot, which saves up time, in turn, for our community managers to actually prioritize looking at the trending content, the high severity issues, the things that are really, the meat and potatoes of our community, and what people really are needing answers to. They don't really have to play that janitor role anymore, because we have the AI Modbot doing that for us, which was a huge win.

Think a couple other examples with implementation of AI into our community. So something that Jeff and I have wanted for so long, did you interject? I'm sorry. It's a slide strobe over here.

Oh, I know, gosh. Translation of user-generated content, right? We're a global company, we pride ourselves off of, we're Zoom, we have people from all over the world, we kind of are mantra, right? It's connecting people no matter where you are.

And so having a global community be able to do that, where a user could post something in Japanese, and somebody who's English-speaking could easily, just with a click of a button, using AI translation, translate that post, and back and forth interact. We had to use third-party implementation for that before, and it was such a nightmare. And so now, it's kind of not rocket science, but just having those types of capabilities that Gainsight community had to offer was very massive. Can I pull, I saw a question earlier that I think touches on that, which was how you managed international expansion over time.

I think someone in the audience is going through that process right now. It sounds like you had both tackled this prior, and then maybe had an evolution and approach moving forward. What does that process look like for Zoom? Who asked that question?

That's okay, prize table, seriously. That's a good one, yeah. Oh my goodness. Okay, hopefully I answered this correctly, but feel free to chime in.

But again, we pride ourselves off of being a global company, and therefore, we always marketed the community as the global Zoom community, right? We wanted everyone to feel invited. Any Zoom user can go there today and register. We allow free Zoom accounts.

I'm sure all of you, if not maybe your grandma or somebody has that free 40-minute Zoom account, right? So free paid Premier users can all come to our site. And so with that, we really do make it a point to provide that localization. So just out of the box when you come to our community, out of the box gains, excuse me, we have the ability where you can toggle your language preference.

Right now, we provide 12 different languages, but we're growing. And then with now, the user-generated content translation, that also accommodates to the global aspect of it as well. And then we do touch on user groups. I actually asked the question to Brian earlier today, if anyone was in the session, about how we can better grow our user groups.

It's kind of an area we're growing into. But anyway, with user groups, we have language and location ones as well, where we try to invite users from different regions to connect and feel a little bit more comfortable, maybe speaking with community members that are within their same language, excuse me, in their same location or speak their same language. Absolutely. Wonderful.

Well, let's go to kind of our last question before we spend the bulk of our time on audience questions. What's next on your roadmap? Where are you all heading next? Well, I'm curious.

I'm just gonna take a poll here. Raise your hand if you don't know what is next or you're struggling with what's next on your community roadmap. Okay, there's a couple. And I think that we're in an interesting kind of transitionary period with AI kind of coming into the play.

And what does that really mean for AI and the human interaction, which is what really community is all about, the people-powered pillars, people-powered pillars that drive communities worldwide. And from our perspective, it's really about how do we take AI and augment that experience? You heard Alexis talk about how we're using that AI moderation capability that's knocking out like 92% of that work, which is allowing those moderators to focus on the people, the engagement directly with the individuals, ensuring that we've got better solutioning, we've got less duplicative content, more, I think, more opportunities for customers to come in and get the right, the correct answer for the first time out. So how do we integrate AI further?

And how do we also advance ourselves to help our own Zoom LLM to learn from the community space and expand there? We talked about localization in local language engagements. That's huge for us. We're not done expanding there.

Zoom is available in every country on the planet, except for three. And we wanna make sure that we address all those languages or as many as we can. And that community's gotta feel like a space that it doesn't matter what language you speak, you can come in and you can converse with any other person, any other geographic location or language natively spoken. So I think it's huge opportunities for us in the community space that really haven't been tapped into yet.

And when we talk about community roadmap, I think that certainly the first question they might ask is, what next for AI in the community? How will that be folded in? One place besides that that I discussed, we're also talking about in-person engagements. We haven't really done this.

In my prior experience with communities, it's been a very successful component of building out a community space for our users is having not just the community space where people can come and go on a daily basis and interact virtually face-to-face, but also in person meetings, local meetups, et cetera, bringing the product team in for our champion calls that we have monthly so that they can talk directly to engineering, to product teams, even to sales and solution engineering teams. And so expanding the engagement that we have internally, I think that's gonna be big for us in the coming months. Do you have anything to add there? I think too, I'd be remiss not to mention, I kind of pointed out there's some of our customer success team members here.

And so, Jeff and I are new to the Gainsight family, but our other Zoom team customer success has been on Gainsight for quite some time. And so I think another selling point, honestly, was having us be within the same family of platforms. And so really excited to understand and explore more of how that can be advantageous for both of our teams to really understand the customer journey on the community and into our customer success instance or vice versa. I think that's honestly a really untapped territory that we haven't even touched yet.

That's right. That's really exciting. Well, wonderful. I think we've got about 10-ish minutes left.

There's a couple of questions that we see already. Let's kind of run through some of the questions that folks had. I think the first question is-- How do I get a Zoom hat? How do you get a Zoom hat?

Come claim it if you've asked your question. Well, yeah, who asked that question? Go get one. Seriously, stand up, go get it.

The first question is around, if you could speak more to how you measure that support impact, the deflection impact that you find your community has. What's that process look like for you all? Yeah, so, I mean, again, it's never gonna be one specific metric per se, but the one I think that I've gravitated towards, I guess I'm contradicting myself here, but the one that I've been gravitating towards lately, because I'm so obsessed with this story and I just love the success that it brings, is really measuring the cost of a support ticket against the number of unique views that a solution has and multiplying that. And in full transparency, it's the amount of solution views that we had, I think in 2025, equated to like $3 million in savings from customer support based off the cost of a support ticket.

So that's probably the easiest way that I can go to my leaders and say, look at the proof is in the pudding, look at how much value this is bringing. But to me, it's not necessarily just about the dollar value as well, right? It's a lot of the qualitative work that goes into there. And so I think showcasing another story that I love to tell is oftentimes, after you launch a community a couple of years, it's very natural to see the number of posts, the content originally kind of increase, and then actually kind of stay sort of static or even decrease, but your page views and your visitors continue to increase.

And the story that that's telling, and what I always love to say is that the community is doing exactly what you want it to do. There's been a wealth of content that people have produced within there. They're searching first, finding what they need, and they didn't even really have to register or log in to create a net new post because it already existed, and people are viewing it, finding what they need, and then that's their solution. When I saw a question that is sort of related to that, a little bit deeper down, which is around any impacts that you might have seen too, like LLM summarization, are you starting to feel any of that reduction in views even in your community or not so much?

I am smiling because I've been watching so many, I feel like I'm seeing some folks in the crowd who've been on webinars or conferences like this who've spoken to that, and a little bit of the unfortunate story of seeing quite a decline. I think we've just been lucky, we haven't been seeing that, and I feel guilty saying that. Watch them next week, things will start to hit us. But again, I think it just goes back to that story of the human to human interaction.

There's such, let me back up, Zoom is not just meetings, and hopefully everybody in this room knows that. We're not just video meetings, we're so much more than that. And with that, we have so many offerings and different features and products, and they get so in the weeds that oftentimes people need a community space to get their very specific use case answered, they need guidance. And so I think for at least right now, hopefully next year I can tell the same story, people are still wanting a community space to ask those questions, and so we're not yet, those questions and those answers are not yet regurgitated into chat GBT.

You're gonna find the knowledge-based content that's gonna help the majority of people, but there's still a huge mass amount of people that are needing those unique questions and answers, yeah. I think what's important to maybe compound on top of that is that you think about our support organization, and this is an organization of about 900 people. They've seen a lot of stuff, but they haven't seen everything. And when you add in the community space, customers, over 10 million customers, hundreds of millions of users, Zoom users worldwide, we have dozens, maybe hundreds of partners, the experience increases exponentially.

Now you have people, frankly, who have seen it all. Once you include them in the conversation, we're learning, we're becoming better at it. We're building better knowledge content as a result of that. We're closing knowledge gaps.

We're making our LLM smarter. It's just closing the circle on the customer experience and ensuring that the customer is more likely to get a better answer for even their unique issue every time. And I see another question that kind of piggybacks off of that notion, which is thinking through the individual asking the question, do you have a mechanism or do you delineate questions from individuals like grandma versus an enterprise size company? Like, is that a distinction that you draw in the community at all?

Or is it kind of irrelevant? Yeah. I know my vote, I would say irrelevant. Yeah, I was gonna say, I think the thing we pride ourselves off of too is it's, everyone's treated equal, right?

So we're not, because we know, if someone has a Zoom Premier account, they're paying the big bucks, they can log a support ticket and work with their TAM and get that level of support. We're more hyper focused on, is this a net new question? Let's ensure it has an answer within 24 to 48 hours. Let's make a delightful first impression of an experience on the community.

And that's where, again, going back to my answer with AI moderation in terms of, I now have a team of community managers that can prioritize the posts that are unique and aren't spam-like or anything like that and allow them to prioritize answering them. And it's really just like a first come, first serve basis, to be honest. I agree. I think even first time Zoom users can be, can teach us something, right?

They see something from a different, fresh perspective and they have something to provide. We definitely don't exclude in that case. Yeah, I actually tell my moderators, do not cherry pick. Yeah.

Don't cherry pick on our community. I love it. Okay, well, let's see. We've probably got time for two more questions.

I see the next one is, I'm launching a brand new community. I'm interested to hear what your biggest failure, learning from launching yours was. What would you have done differently? Oh my gosh.

I feel like there is a list probably. Yeah. You need another session. Oh my goodness.

Anything jump to mind? I mean, I think give yourself more than 90 days to a new community or either stand up a new community or migrate. Time, yeah, I feel like that could be the answer. If time is on your side, I think you could definitely do things better.

But I think it's, you know, we're probably going into this back in 2020 and again in 2025, last year when we migrated to platform to platform. I think that, you know, in each of those cases, it was really rush. Both of them were very rushed situations for uniquely different reasons. We can talk about the latter separately offline.

But I think that the, you know, the challenge for us was when we talked about all of those attributes on the balancing slide that we had a few slides back, you know, we're trying to address everything, address champions, address, you know, MVP structure, we've been addressing badging, you know, all of the rules of engagement, you know, how we, where we would moderate, draw the line where we wouldn't, et cetera. Like it was, I would say it was probably more daunting than we realized going into it. And we didn't go live with everything on day one. So we assumed that there would be some, you know, some minor crashes along the way.

And so I think if you make that assumption that you're not gonna roll out with perfection, that your things are gonna be fine. You're gonna figure it out. The champions ultimately, they absorb quite a bit, right? They see the errors or the challenges as we're building the community.

But as long as we're transparent with them and we had regular meetings and engagements with them and they understood what we were trying to build and they all kind of shared in that success for us. Kind of cheered us along and helped us, you know, to build that community. So again, you know, day one rollout, it's not gonna be perfect. But if you, you know, still have a plan aspirations, you're gonna get there.

Don't let yourself. I think too, to piggyback off that a couple of things you're reminding me of, I think one of the biggest, admittedly, mistakes that we made is so, I mentioned early on that we tried to first launch in beta. And by doing that, we were heavily focused on, let's pick one or two industries that Zoom is heavily invested in. Again, keep in mind, this is 2021.

And we had education for Zoom, right? It was just skyrocketing. People using Zoom to teach courses online. And so we thought, let's launch the Zoom education community.

That's how we marketed it. And ironically, not a lot of people from education came. Or if they did, they didn't reveal themselves as coming from education. They just revealed themselves as I'm a Zoom user and I need help doing X, Y, and Z.

Can someone on this community help me? And so I think in hindsight, for us, we thought we needed that cushion of having a targeted audience, a smaller targeted audience, but we didn't, everyone wanted to come on day one. So that's the worst. We should have just kicked the doors wide open and just.

Yeah. And then I think also, like I've mentioned, I think this isn't necessarily the question, but my biggest piece of advice for anyone in community, whether you're starting out or you're still doing it, you have to always stay true to your goal. Once you lose sight of your goal, what's the purpose of this community, there's no point. People get so off the tracks with just, oh, let's include marketing, customer success, customer support, and that's great, and product, and engineering, and everyone wants to see at the table, and that's fantastic because you're proving the value from so many different directions of community, but that can easily overwhelm you, and then you lose sight of what is the actual goal of this community, and I truly do believe that is the number one reason we're so successful, that we sit within customer support.

We are so clear on what is the objective of this community, and it's always, for the foreseeable future, staying that way, we absolutely invite other teams to have a seat at our table, but having that North Star has really helped us be successful, and so that would be my biggest piece of advice for anyone. It's so clear, oh, I'm sorry, I think we're wrapping up on time here, but it is so deeply clear that that is primary amongst every decision that the two of you make, is keeping your members at the forefront of, what is the most beneficial for folks? I do recognize there's a bunch of questions we didn't get an opportunity to tackle. I think I can speak on behalf of Jeff and Alexis and say, come on up, but for now, join me in thanking both Alexis and Jeff for their time today.

(audience applauds)