Vimeo sees AI deliver tailored, efficient CX to its massive global user base

Zendesk is a customer experience platform offering AI-powered support solutions. Its AI agents combine generative AI with customizable flows, enabling businesses to automate customer interactions, personalize support experiences, and scale CX operations efficiently.

Vimeo is the world's most innovative online video experience platform, providing software and services for video creation, collaboration, and distribution to millions of users globally. Founded in 2004 and headquartered in New York, Vimeo serves small-to-midsize businesses, large enterprises, marketers, agencies, filmmakers, and creative professionals. The platform hosts over 350,000 video uploads per day and serves 50 billion annual video views, with over 1,200 employees.

As Vimeo's customer base diversified and its product offerings expanded, the volume and complexity of support inquiries grew significantly. Providing 24/7 service to a global user base of millions with a lean Digital Support team of just six people was a major challenge. Early virtual agent experiments relying on NLP offered limited functionality and rigid, keyword-based interactions. Generative AI initially seemed risky due to concerns about hallucinations and unpredictable outputs, but by 2023, advancements in safety guardrails convinced the team to reconsider AI for customer service.

Vimeo implemented Zendesk AI agents, leveraging a hybrid model that combines generative AI replies with customizable structured flows. Vimeo partnered closely with Zendesk Assist solution consultants over several months to test workflows, implement SSO-based personalization, and use APIs to tailor experiences based on account type and plan level. The AI agent could recognize user identity and plan level to deliver contextually relevant support or escalate to a human agent when needed.

Key use cases included: billing and subscription inquiries (scripted flows for uniform, accurate responses), video management (generative AI guiding users through embedding, uploading, sharing), account and plan management (personalized experiences via real-time API integrations), and core product segmentation (search rules and intents to distinguish user types). Vimeo also used AI conversation logs as a Voice of Customer (VOC) data source to surface product feedback, pain points, and bugs. Content writers and developers collaborated to optimize AI agent content as part of company-wide workflows.

Since launching Zendesk AI agents, Vimeo achieved measurable improvements: self-service increased 18–20%, AI agent conversation volume grew 36%, automated resolution rate improved 2–3 percentage points over the previous solution, 43% of AI agent interactions now come from authenticated users, and the automation rate stabilized at 30–40%. Qualitatively, the implementation fostered cross-team collaboration and the AI conversation logs became a valuable source of product and strategy insights.