Ricky Kapur, Head of APAC at Zoom (right in pic), believes that the current workplace – and for the foreseeable future – is a hybrid working environment.
“We’re seeing with about 95% accuracy that it’s all about hybrid work. There are very few companies I’ve spoken with – I can’t even recall one – where you have every employee coming into the office every day, 9-5, 5 days a week; that is not today’s world. You always have some people inside the workplace, some people at home, some people traveling between the two. You always have some people physically in the room, and some people on a Zoom call or video call or is otherwise connected electronically.”
It is in this business environment that businesses need to pivot, and one area where Zoom has spent significant amount of time and effort into navigating.
“I think most companies are trying to navigate this world. People want choice; they want convenience, agility, and flexibility – but they also want human connection. What we are trying to focus on is how we can make technology frictionless. We’re doing a lot of spending and R&D to make technology frictionless; the simplest, smallest things make a big difference to people.”
Kapur said this during a fireside chat at the highly successful Malaysian Digital Expo (MDX) 2023 held recently, and which was attended by Business Today.
Moderated by Gopi Ganesalingam, Senior Vice President at MDEC, the fireside chat focussed on “Building Businesses: The Importance of Pivoting”.
Kapur is no stranger to pivoting, which he describes as moving from one market or business area to another. He had been in the tech space for over 30 years, with companies such as Oracle, Google, Microsoft and Zoom; companies that at their time had undergone major transformations.
“I’ve got front-row seats to pivoting and transformation; changing a lot about how your go-to-market is, and the kind of skills and capabilities you build. A lot of what I’ve been doing is change management; building new skills, new go-to-markets, and pivoting.”
One of Kapur’s favourite pieces of advice for SMEs when it comes to pivoting, and of which he is a big fan, is ‘experimental design’.
“You have to test a few things out; you’ve done your data analysis, so put in a few experiments and give it two months and test it out. See what works and what doesn’t, and learn from that. I’m a big fan of testing a few things out, learning from the test, and then see what succeeds and then go with that.”
Kapur also believes that companies that want to pivot need to keep a close eye on their core market.
“The market gives you enough signals. If you’re close enough to your customers, you have enough opportunity to pick up on the fact that the market is shifting, and companies that react well pick up the signals fast.
“In the case of Zoom, it was much easier. There was a very big existential event (the COVID-19 pandemic) that made Zoom rise to a place where it was a loved product for consumers, corporates, professionals, and businesses. But you knew the pandemic was going to be over; the world would be different, but it would be some sort of a hybrid world. So you have to keep building towards that world –how would the company need to be different? What kind of products and services would we need to offer? How would we stay relevant in the world that is going to be in front of us?”
Not only does Zoom embrace innovation, which Kapur notes that all organisations should, Zoom also welcomes innovation, disruption and competition in the marketplace.
“Innovation is not something you can be afraid of. Innovation, disruption, competition just makes you better at the end of the day. Do expect to see a lot of startups bringing new innovation in the space. In the world of generative AI, for instance, a lot of companies are coming and building up there. So you keep scanning the market and seeing what is out there.”
The key to successful pivoting is to keep customers satisfied, he adds.
“You have to know your customers well; you’ve got to have customer obsession, customer intimacy, whatever terminology. At Zoom, we call it customer happiness. There’re so many different ways to measure it. You can measure it in revenue on one hand. On the other hand, you can measure customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score. You measure it in ways customers take on additional products of yours. You measure it in various polls you take.”
However organisations do it, Kapur notes it is important for them to have agility in the way they communicate with your customers in such a way that they’re getting their feedback in real time.
“That’s one of the things that Zoom has been really good at, where the feedback comes and you’ve got agility in your engineering where you will innovate very quickly. As a company, product innovation is where we’ve pivoted. Video by itself may be a killer application but in the hybrid world, people are going to need more and different kinds of services. So we started with product innovation by introducing a lot of different products.
“For instance, we introduced Zoom Phone for cloud PBX and telephony for when people are going to a bit more mobile. We came out with Zoom Contact Centre, a video-enabled contact centre. We made acquisitions around employee experience. And we did all of this by constantly talking to the customers who love Zoom, and we kept learning.”
Kapur acknowledges that there remains a space for in-person communications, even for Zoom.
“Let’s say you’re trying to complete a sale. It depends on how involved that process is; for some more complex processes where you need to build trust, people want to be in physical presence. I’m not always sitting behind a Zoom call; I’m in KL now and I have a number of meetings with various senior stakeholders in industry. I was two weeks ago in India and Australia, meeting with customers and partners.
“The other day, Zoom asked our employees to come back two days a week in certain offices. And there was so much press around them which was around ‘if Zoom is calling employees back, is video dead?’ The reality is if you want to stay relevant to your customer, and your customers come in into their office two to three days a week in a hybrid world, how can you build impactful frictionless software for that customer if you don’t know the world they live in? So we decided to come back in their world, so that we can be relevant to that customer right at the end of the day, and it is not all on a Zoom call.”
For SMEs, Ricky offers more advice. “In today’s world, depending on the area you’re in, you have the opportunity to get scale on platforms such as Zoom and be connected with customers beyond your boundaries, be it a city or country. Technology today, whether it’s Zoom Phone or webinars or very highly-involved choreographed production events done from just a few admin controls, gives you the ability to look as big as a big company. Use that use that to look 10X more professional and significant. You can scale and get audiences outside of your core market.
“Also, spend some time with the ecosystem. Figure out what your ecosystem is; figure out whether it’s a product-based ecosystem or a go-to-market-based ecosystem, but once you know what your ecosystem should be, go out and meet with those people because that actually will make a big difference. The ones who figured out their ecosystem scale faster, and it’s not just better word-of-mouth; I think you can figure out a way to make your product a lot better as well.”
