The Gist
AI-first support: Zoom is shifting from phone-centric support to AI-assisted voice and chat that route customers to the right answer or the right person — fast. Knowledge powers AI: Robust knowledge management (product docs + agent learnings + case notes) is the backbone for reducing hallucinations and improving outcomes. Omnichannel by design: Customer preferences span phone, chat, text, web, bots and social — Zoom’s strategy is to meet people where they already are. Agent experience matters: The next big wins come from giving agents the same quality of digital tools customers have — and turning great agent resolutions into future self-service. Search is evolving: LLMs and AI overviews change content discovery, pushing teams to structure content for machine understanding and citation.
On this episode of The Digital Experience, CMSWire Editor-in-Chief Dom Nicastro sits down with Jeff Harling, head of global digital customer experience at Zoom. Harling traces his path from early self-service programs to leading post-sale digital support at scale and breaks down how AI, knowledge management and channel choice are reshaping the customer journey.
The conversation ranges from voice bots and predictive routing to the often-overlooked agent experience, where better tools can translate frontline insights into tomorrow’s self-service. Harling also shares how Zoom structures content for AI discovery and why “meet customers where they are” is more than a mantra — it’s the operating system for modern CX.
Episode Transcript
Editor’s note: This transcript was edited for brevity and clarity.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Hey everybody, Dom Nicastro here, editor in chief of CMSWire.com, here for another edition of the CMSWire TV show, The Digital Experience. We’ve got the perfect guest for that today: Jeff Harling, the head of global digital customer experience at Zoom. Jeff, what’s going on?
Jeff Harling: Just enjoying the day. It’s been a great summer so far and I am excited to be here. Thank you, Dom, I appreciate your invite. We’ve got a lot of good stuff to talk about. This is a great time to be alive in the digital space.
Table of Contents
The Disruption of AI vs. The Internet
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Lots of innovation happening. I was in newspapers back in 2000 when something called the Internet came along. That upended everything in the media world. And now we’ve got AI doing the same thing. I’m trying to figure out what’s the bigger disruptor: the Internet or AI? What do you think?
Jeff Harling: It could be an esoteric question. Neither of them are fads. AI is definitely here to stay. From a disruption perspective, the Internet created connection points. Now AI improves those connection points, creating experiences that are more dynamic, personalized and predictive. Back in the day you had to search for information; now AI brings information together, includes what it knows about you, and even anticipates your needs. That is a revolutionary moment — and it will reshape how people discover and navigate experiences, including through AI-powered search.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: I was editing a story today for CMSWire where a contributor noted we’ll soon see predictive AI reaching out to customers before they even call support — proactive messages like, “We noticed a glitch, let’s fix that.” That’s impressive, and lines up with what we’re hearing about proactive, predictive service in contact centers.
Jeff Harling: A personal assistant — that’s what I’m hoping for. Someone who anticipates when the groceries get low and has my favorites replenished at my doorstep without me even thinking about it.
Introducing Jeff Harling
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Just don’t get that notification late at night, Jeff — that means you’re snacking too much! But let’s get into this properly. I didn’t even give you a chance to introduce yourself. Tell me about your professional history leading up to this role at Zoom.
Jeff Harling: The Taco Bell craving comes on…
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: And when you got to this role, what’s the makeup of your team and how does it look day to day at Zoom?
Jeff Harling: Thanks, Dom. This could be a long story, but I’ll summarize. I spent some time in the Air Force before Y2K, doing early warning satellites and weather tracking. Coming out, I was interested in tech and took my first job at AT&T, supporting voicemail and large phone systems. I loved the space. One of my leaders recognized I could mentor others. Self-service was just emerging — the web was young. We realized we weren’t sharing lessons learned well, so we started a small team providing documentation, FAQs and information to employees, and eventually customers. That evolved into what became a digital self-service movement — from internal wikis to public knowledge — and it mirrors how organizations today still rely on strong FAQs and knowledge bases to empower customers.
Related Article: Digital Experience 2024: Insights From the Frontlines of AI, CMS and DXPs
Career Across Telecom And Tech
Jeff Harling: I went on to work for Comcast, Zendesk, Avaya, RingCentral, and now Zoom. In each case, I focused on scaling digital self-service. My work spanned forums, social media, SEO, building websites, chatbots and now AI experiences. Knowledge and content management have always been key. At Zoom, I manage everything post-sale — support, digital experience, everything except phone (which we’re starting to integrate). Customers can engage digitally for fast answers, or move to live agents for complex issues. It’s all about giving them the choice and the speed they need.
Early Employee FAQs And Knowledge Sharing
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: You mentioned FAQs for employees. Did Jeff Harling create the intranet? Back then it felt like a list of links or a wiki, no real search. Now of course companies have much more robust systems.
Jeff Harling: No search — that’s right. A lot of bookmarks.
Joining Zoom in the Eye of the Storm
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: They’ve built models now. The game has been changed. And we even have a brand based off of that world, rework.co. We are totally in the digital workplace arena with that. And it’s incredible to see the evolution there. Your background is impressive because you’ve got the technology side and the practitioner side. You’re leading digital customer experience. When you set foot into Zoom, what were your early priorities in terms of digital experience? Where do customers live and how do you meet them there?
Jeff Harling: Yeah, it was a chaotic time. I joined Zoom in 2020, right in the eye of the storm. As you can imagine, Zoom was exploding. We were the beneficiary of the COVID era — just look at the history of the stock price. We were still a young upstart, having IPO’d two years earlier, but there was no self-service or digital experience practice to speak of. We were all about serving customers via the phone. Email was an option, but it wasn’t a great experience.
The Problem With Email Support
Jeff Harling: Emails often required a lot of back and forth, and ultimately customers would just pick up the phone anyway. It wasn’t efficient, and it highlighted how much we needed to expand our customer experience strategy.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Some companies still rely on email-only customer service, and it drives me nuts. You get the “We’ll get back to you in 24–48 hours” message. I was expecting seconds, not days. That’s channel forcing — pushing customers into one channel you want them to use, rather than letting them choose.
Jeff Harling: That is fascinating. And you’re right. The strategy of digital customer experience is all about going to the customer, not expecting them to come find you. Some prefer email, others prefer phone, but many just want to chat quickly or look up an answer in a knowledge base and move on.
Related Article: 7 Actions to Elevate Your Contact Center From Cost Center to CX Engine
Customer Preferences and Channel Diversity
What Customers Want, When They Want It
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: I don’t always need quick answers. If I’m in the middle of the workday, I can stay on hold for 20 minutes while cranking out emails and content. So much depends on the customer’s context. Are you seeing a dominant channel where most customers live, or is the data showing it’s all over the place?
Jeff Harling: We’re in a transitionary period. Some customers — often older generations — still prefer live communication, that phone call. My father was like that; he didn’t want to email, definitely didn’t want to chat. But millennials, Gen Z, and even Gen Alpha prefer chat, DMs, or text messages. For them, asynchronous communication is fine. They don’t want to call. My kids have barely spent any time on phone calls in their lives. They want everything digital.
Learning OpportunitiesView all
Offering Multiple Paths
Jeff Harling: So we’re addressing both sides of the spectrum. We offer half a dozen channels — web ticket, chatbot, even voice bots — giving customers choices. It’s all about providing omnichannel experiences that meet customers where they are.
Balancing Enterprise and Freemium Users
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Zoom is unique. You’ve got a huge consumer base on the freemium plan, and you’ve got enterprise customers. Do you split your CX strategy between them?
Jeff Harling: Absolutely. We deliver different levels of experience for different segments. Enterprise customers get preferential treatment — direct connections to their technical account managers or customer success managers, no wait, no bot. Freemium and low-tier license customers still get choice, but through more standardized channels. We’re seeing customers gravitate toward their preferred channel, and the data is helping us understand those behaviors better every day.
Defining Customer Centricity
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah, yeah. What does customer centricity mean to you? There are so many thought leaders talking about that term. How do you put some muscle behind it and live it in your world?
Jeff Harling: I love the term customer centricity. It’s a popular buzzword at conferences and in industry associations, but truly doing it is another level of effort. For me, it means listening and being reactive to every message, every question, every solution. It means taking action and closing the loop. Traditional customer support — whether online or live — has often been reactive: provide a solution, hang up, move on. But what’s learned from those calls? If I take five of the same calls in a day, how do I reduce that to three tomorrow, then one, then zero? That’s when customer centricity becomes real.
Closing the Loop
Jeff Harling: Customer centricity comes alive when you provide the experience customers want where they want it, while also improving the experience for future customers. That’s when you can truly call yourself customer centric.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: You know who never says “customer-centric”? Customers. They don’t say, “That company was customer-centric.” They say, “It took five minutes and they solved my problem.” We talk more about the experience than the actual product. People don’t brag about how many apps they can download on their phones — they say, “I called and they solved it quickly.”
Related Article: Why Customer Centricity Fails Without Cross-Team Collaboration
Listening to Customers and Agents
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Customers today just want to be heard. Listening is huge. But how do you listen when there are so many touchpoints — website, call center, surveys? One of the best listening mechanisms is the agents themselves. They know more about customers than even executives sometimes. So what are your listening approaches for gathering insights and acting on them?
Jeff Harling: That’s exactly the right question. When a customer engages with an agent, the agent is also in an engagement — using tools like ServiceNow, Salesforce or Zendesk to provide solutions and responses. They’re in a digital experience themselves. It’s not just a voice conversation; they’re leveraging technology to deliver better outcomes.
The Agent Experience
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: It’s like digital experience for the agent.
Jeff Harling: Exactly. And it’s been ignored for too long. We’ve built web experiences for customers, knowledge bases, chatbots — but what about the agent? The agent experience may be the most revolutionary space right now. Besides AI, giving agents better tools lets us evaluate how well they support customers, and whether those interactions can be turned into future self-service experiences. Many customers prefer to self-serve if possible. Agents can provide the knowledge that eventually fuels those experiences.
Improving the Agent Experience
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: And agents want that support. I spend time on Reddit, where call center agents vent openly. They say AI might help, but bosses still pressure them with unfair metrics like resolution time. We’re not analyzing enough about tone, empathy, or whether the situation was truly resolved. Agent experience doesn’t get enough attention. Do you see yourself playing in both employee digital experience and customer digital experience?
Jeff Harling: Absolutely. My remit is post-sale digital experience, but we’re encroaching on agent experience. In my past roles, I always spoke with frontline agents to understand their challenges. Too often agents were going to the same website as customers to search for answers. They didn’t have enhanced capabilities to make them more effective. That’s a dilemma. Agents should have more resources and internal tools than customers. Customers should get self-service where possible, but when they reach an agent, it should be a clear value add.
Creating Value for Agents and Customers
Jeff Harling: The tech industry hasn’t focused enough on the agent experience. We assume agents are well-trained and can improvise solutions. But much of what they do is repeatable and could be enhanced with better systems. The challenge is creating an experience that adds value to reaching an agent, while still making as much as possible available via digital channels. That’s how you improve both sides of the equation — agent and customer — in a truly customer-centric environment.
The Role of Knowledge Management in Digital Support
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah, 100%. You mentioned knowledge management earlier, and we’ve touched a little on that. What does it mean in terms of your ability to provide great digital support with knowledge management?
Jeff Harling: This is probably my favorite question so far, because knowledge management has been the foundation of information that makes AI work. Experts across the field agree: if you don’t have a solid knowledge management practice, your AI will struggle to get off the ground. It’s how prompt engineering works, how you reduce bias and hallucinations, how the LLM builds itself. Everything happens based on content. Nothing in AI comes out of thin air.
From Documentation to Learnings
Jeff Harling: Knowledge management isn’t just documenting new product features or processes. It’s also about capturing learnings — case notes, customer interactions, and agent feedback. Structured content combined with these lived experiences is the future of knowledge management. If you don’t already have a practice in place, that’s the number one thing to start building. As we’ve seen in knowledge management: the backbone of exceptional AI execution, it underpins everything from service to self-service to AI readiness.
Websites, AI Bots and SEO Disruption
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Another area where customer information has traditionally lived is the website. But that world is being disrupted by AI bots like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity. Google still dominates discovery with around 90% market share, but we’re seeing more referrals from AI tools. Where’s your head at with web experience design and SEO? Sometimes when I’m coding up a story, I wonder if keywords are even useful anymore. Where’s your head at there?
Jeff Harling: It’s a competitive landscape. Trusted sources like vendor documentation coexist with user-driven sources like Reddit. AI pulls from both. User communities can be gold — repeated responses and peer validation matter. But providers like Zoom best know their products and fixes. The balance between proven and unproven sources is critical. As covered in AI-powered search engines, the space is shifting fast. New models like Gemini and RAG are proving out structured sourcing for AI-driven experiences.
Related Article: How Is Generative AI Changing SEO Strategy?
Optimizing Content for AI and LLMs
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: It’s the zero-click era. Consumers get their answers directly in AI overviews, whether from Google or ChatGPT. I asked ChatGPT about training my puppy, and it gave me a step-by-step list in seconds. If I Google it, I have to read an article or a blog. Zoom needs its content surfaced in those LLMs. Have you changed your content strategy to optimize for AI?
Jeff Harling: Completely. With knowledge management comes structured content, and structure is key. Keywords and metadata were once central, but today it’s about content positioning, clarity, and relatedness. AI sweeps through your content, infers the right answer, and validates it against related materials. If those materials align, they become the answer. We’ve even seen hallucinations in our own chatbot, forcing us to go back and improve clarity and structure. As optimizing content for AI-driven search shows, structure and connected context are what make your content visible in the new ecosystem.
AI-Driven Contact Center Transformation
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Yeah, yeah, you said answers. Answers are everything now — question and answer, question and answer. That’s what the bots pick up on. Looking ahead to the rest of 2025 and into 2026, what’s top of mind for digital experience at Zoom? Is there a big project under the hood, or a lot of smaller efforts keeping you busy?
Jeff Harling: Great question. At Zoom, we have a contact center product that includes a digital chatbot experience — AI-driven chat, including voice. While that’s not unique, we’re focused on improving the voice experience for technical support. Rather than immediately connecting customers to a live agent, we’re leveraging AI to identify who they are, what segment they’re in, and what their issue might be. That allows us to route them more intelligently — either to the right answer, the right person, or a hybrid of both. This is where we’ll drive the most digital experience satisfaction in the near future.
Integrating Channels Seamlessly
Jeff Harling: We’re also working on tighter integration between voice and chatbots. Whether it’s making a payment or troubleshooting a product, AI needs to understand what customers already own and tailor support accordingly. With stronger AI in contact centers, we can anticipate customer needs, personalize support, and unify experiences across channels.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: We’ve been following that trajectory with Zoom Contact Center. We cover both digital experience platforms and the contact center space at CMSWire. And it’s clear: AI is far more impactful in contact centers than in traditional web experience. Would you agree?
Jeff Harling: I do. The fence between web experience and contact center experience is becoming transparent. Customers move between them seamlessly, creating new opportunities to serve them better — in the right place, at the right time.
Related Article: Agentic AI and the Future of Customer Support: What CX Leaders Need to Know
Social Media as a Service Channel
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Are customers still engaging heavily on social media — tagging Zoom, complaining publicly? Or has that declined with AI and chatbots?
Jeff Harling: Social media hasn’t lost influence. My team monitors X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, LinkedIn and more around the clock. The next frontier will be AI-enhanced responsiveness on social platforms. People vent at 2 a.m., and we sometimes miss it. The challenge is surfacing those signals across platforms so nothing slips through. As younger generations bring social-first habits into the workplace, this channel will only grow. At some point, social may rival phone, chat and text in importance.
Generational Shifts in Communication
Jeff Harling: Gen Alpha, for example, lives on social media. As they move into professional roles, they’ll bring that with them. We have to be ready for social to become as competitive as any other channel. This aligns with what we’ve reported about Gen Z redefining customer expectations, and the same trend will hold for the next wave.
Final Thoughts on AI and CX
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: Jeff, you’ve been great with your time. Any final thoughts — something you wanted to highlight or what excites you most about the future?
Jeff Harling: I can’t overstate the impact AI is having — not only on customer experience but also on the agent experience. Contact centers are evolving at the same pace as the AI revolution. I’m excited about the personalization and the dynamic, less “flat” experiences we’re building. Like I said at the beginning, this is an incredibly exciting time to be in digital experience.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: It’s even changing arguments at home. My wife asks ChatGPT to interpret my comments — and it tells her I’m being dismissive! That’s disruption. Jeff, thanks again for letting us behind the curtain at Zoom. It’s been awesome.
Jeff Harling: Thank you, Dom. Have a wonderful day.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire: You too.