OpsStars Event Preview: How The Zoom Ops Team Adapted To The Growing Demand For Virtual Meetings

Zoom is all about keeping businesses and people connected. But with the global shift to remote work and learning, this mission took on a new imperative – and saw Zoom’s daily meeting participants jump from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million by the end of April 2020. The pressure was on to ensure operations kept up with the growing demand. 

To learn more about how the team did it, Demand Gen Report caught up with the Ops team behind Zoom’s success for an early look at their session, “Scaling Lead Management to Meet an Unprecedented Time,” at this year’s Virtual OpsStars conference, taking place Oct. 20-21, 2020. Michael Fedynyshyn, Senior Manager of Sales Operations, and Caterina Torres, Team Lead for Sales Data Systems and Process Management, gave us a sneak peek into what happened behind the scenes as the demand for Zoom grew during the pandemic.

Demand Gen Report: What were you seeing in the early days of the pandemic?  

Zoom: At the beginning of March, COVID-19 hadn’t been declared a pandemic yet, but the situation was evolving quickly. It was right after that Zoom employees began working remotely, and other businesses quickly followed. We started seeing more incoming requests, slowly at first and then a sudden spike in demand nearly overnight across all channels.

From an operational standpoint, we knew the stakes were high. We had to keep Zoom up and running to manage the demand that was coming in. Businesses, schools, hospitals and other vital organizations – they couldn’t wait for days to be up and running again. We need to make sure we were responding quickly to all incoming requests. Everyone deserved a callback, and that's what we tried to focus on.

DGR: What was “a day in the life” like during this time?

Zoom: It was all hands on deck. Every 24 hours, we were adapting to a changing environment. And it touched everyone, all the way from Sales to CSMs to Marketing to Operations. Demand was pouring in through all channels. The Ops team was working from home like everyone else at this point, but we stayed focused, executed operations as a united global team and never lost sight of our most important priority: the people who needed us to be there.

The theme of LeanData’s OpsStars event this year – “The Rise of Ops” – is a reality we witnessed firsthand during this experience. We are very happy and proud of the role Ops played in Zoom’s ability to support the world through this critical time.

DGR: How was Zoom able to scale its lead management process so quicky?

Zoom: Honestly, it was because of the purchase and installation of LeanData that we were able to scale lead management so quickly to meet demand at this level. LeanData replaced our custom-coded matching and routing rules in Salesforce, which became increasingly difficult to manage as Zoom grew and routing rules became more complex.

We deployed LeanData on March 4, just as offices around the globe started to work remotely. The timing was perfect! LeanData worked around the clock to deploy certain system changes for us. Because the team at LeanData was so hands-on and willing to scale their tool with us during such an unprecedented time, we were able to manage the demand in a much more organized and timely way.

We were able to manage the unexpected, explosive growth in lead volumes from around the world as businesses, schools and individuals sought to stay connected during COVID-19. But the biggest benefit LeanData brings is the flexibility to scale with the speed of Zoom’s business. Now that we have LeanData, we can make changes in a week that would’ve taken us months previously. We’re much more flexible and we can move faster and adapt to market conditions

DGR: How do you see Ops changing as we transition to a world where face-to-face meetings are no longer how business is conducted?

Zoom: In general, I think hiring for talent will no longer be restricted to the proximity of an office. People will gain much more flexibility in their personal lives as they can take calls from their phones between doctor’s visits. And families will be given the ability to grow closer since they will all be together under the same roof during the day. With all of that, people will be happier, and it will show in their work.