The Gist
- AI-powered efficiency. Zoom leverages AI for meeting summaries, real-time collaboration, and intelligent customer support to enhance efficiency.
- Optimizing e-commerce. Dani Olean’s team improved Zoom’s checkout process, boosting conversion rates through A/B testing, personalization, and streamlined UX.
- Personalization is the next frontier. Zoom aims to refine digital experiences, tailoring recommendations and checkout flows to individual users while maintaining a seamless experience.
Table of Contents
Transforming Digital Experiences at Zoom: A Conversation with Dani Olean
From optimizing checkout flows to integrating AI-driven solutions, Zoom’s ecommerce team is on a mission to create seamless, personalized digital experiences. In this episode of CMSWire TV’s Digital Experience Show, Dani Olean, group manager, global e-commerce at Zoom, joins Dom Nicastro to discuss the rapid evolution of Zoom’s online business.
Dani shares insights on how her team transformed Zoom’s ecommerce platform—boosting conversion rates, expanding payment options, and reducing checkout friction. She also explains how AI is revolutionizing workflows, from meeting summaries to real-time customer insights.
What’s next for Zoom? A deeper focus on personalization, data-driven optimizations and AI-enhanced commerce. Read on for a deep dive into how Zoom is redefining digital experiences for businesses and consumers alike.
Introduction: Breaking into Product Management
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire Hey everybody, Dom Nicastro here, Editor-in-Chief of CMSWire.com, here for another edition of the Digital Experience on CMSWire TV. And we’re here with our latest amazing guest… Well, we don’t know if she’s amazing yet. We haven’t heard her speak, but we’ll let you decide. I did hear her speak—that’s why she’s on the show. And I’ll explain that in a second. Welcome, Dani Olean, group manager, global e-commerce from Zoom. What’s going on, Dani?
Dani Olean Hi, happy to be here, Dom. Hope you’re doing well. Thanks for having me.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire Yeah, you too. We caught up last year at Opti-Con—Optimizely’s conference—where you were on a panel I attended. And I thought, “I don’t care what she’s doing after this, we’re going to get her on the show.” So here we are months later. It’s good to have you.
Dani Olean Great to be here, thank you.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire Dani, let’s talk about your career journey. You’re at Zoom now, but how did you get here? What were the key moments?
Dani Olean Yeah, sure. Let me actually bring you all the way back—over 10 years ago—when I started in sales. I was actually very, very good at sales, but I didn’t like it because it wasn’t enough problem-solving for me. So I left and joined a pre-IPO tech company called Wayfair.com. You might have heard of it. I started there as an extranet support associate. Fun fact—I didn’t even know what an extranet was. I had to Google it.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire Sure.
Dani Olean And I thought, “Yeah, I think I can do that.” I didn’t have a tech degree. The closest I had come was coding my MySpace page. That was the extent of my HTML and CSS experience.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire What was your MySpace profile song? Because mine was Island in the Sun by Weezer. I was so proud of that.
Dani Olean I was a little grungy back then, so it was probably something from Nirvana. Or maybe Tupac—I liked both a lot. Anyway, I started in a support technical role at Wayfair, and the way I transitioned into product management was by working myself out of my own job. I was answering support tickets all day, every day, and I started analyzing them. I realized that 70% of the tickets weren’t actual bugs—they were just training questions. So I told the team, “If we build a help center, I bet we could reduce these by 70%.” They gave me an engineer to help, and we did just that. The results were exactly what we expected, and that launched my career in product management.
From Startups to Zoom
Dani Olean From there, I joined another early-stage company, Drizzly.com, before moving on to a few other startups. I was obsessed with the pre-IPO tech space. But as I got older, I decided I wanted something a little more stable—something with more funding, where I wasn’t setting up Google Analytics from scratch. That’s when I found the perfect mix at Zoom.
Fun fact: I actually joined Zoom before the pandemic. It wasn’t the pandemic that made Zoom special to me—it was Eric Yuan’s story. He left his prior company because he wanted to build a tech company that truly cared about customers. He felt like his previous company had stopped listening to customer needs, and he had this huge pain point he wanted to solve. That resonated with me, and I joined Zoom five years ago as an individual contributor. Now, I run a large team.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire Wow. So basically, year one or two of your time at Zoom was when the pandemic hit?
Dani Olean Yeah. My first month at Zoom was January 2020.
Zoom’s Ecommerce Transformation During the Pandemic
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire Three months later, everything changed. What was that like for you?
Dani Olean It transformed overnight. Before I joined, no one had really focused on the e-commerce flow. There was this idea that there was an opportunity to mature it, so I started analyzing how we could optimize and improve the experience. Then, suddenly, it wasn’t just a nice-to-have—it became critical. We needed to make sure it was stable, scalable, personalized and internationalized.
We had two tracks. The first was improving the actual checkout flow. We modernized it from what I jokingly called a 1990s website to an early 2000s version. Still had work to do, but it was a massive jump. The second track was hiring a team. I was the only one working on this, and I was working almost 24/7—overnights, weekends, everything. Over the next couple of years, we built out a 20-person team. At one point, I was doing the work of what 20 people now do. Eventually, the company even built a business unit around us—the Online Business Unit, which now has over 100 people.
Related Article: Top Digital Experience Trends for 2024
Scaling Zoom’s Ecommerce During a Global Crisis
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire You literally lived digital transformation at your company—you had to. The customers were telling you, “We need this now.” And by “we,” I mean thousands of people, suddenly. The scale must have been horrifying, exciting, and challenging all at once. Walk me through that. The bandwidth alone on the website—what was that like with all those massive hits increasing in 2020?
Dani Olean Yeah, exactly. I think our biggest priority was making sure the website didn’t go down. We were pretty successful in scaling, and our partners stepped up to the challenge, but it was a massive effort. One of the biggest gaps we faced was internationalization. There were payment methods we didn’t support yet—like ACH bank-to-bank transfers—so we had to accelerate maturity in a very short time.
It wasn’t just about infrastructure—it was payments, security, privacy, personalization, tracking the right data and scaling our systems to support all of that. We had to ensure proper monitoring and analysis at every step.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire So your transformation was paralleling what the whole world was going through. You could really speak to your customers because you were literally living what they were experiencing—you needed tools like Zoom to get through the digital shift as seamlessly as possible.
Dani Olean I definitely walked the walk. A lot of people don’t know this, but I lived alone during the pandemic. I was working from home almost 24/7, and the only vehicle connecting me to my friends and family was Zoom. We used it for virtual dinners, comedy shows, even talent shows. And then, of course, I was on it all day for work.
What’s interesting is that five years later, I have close bonds with people I met entirely through Zoom. I met one woman in person for the first time just last year, and people couldn’t believe how close we were. But Zoom did that. It wasn’t about physical presence—it was about connection. If you can be vulnerable and someone accepts you for who you are, that’s what truly fosters human connection.
The Impact of Zoom on Everyday Life
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire You just reminded me of when I got my mother on Zoom for a family call. She didn’t quite understand how it worked. She saw all the little squares of people’s faces, but she thought she could just have a conversation with me one-on-one. Meanwhile, there were 17 other people on the call, and she kept talking over them. I kept saying, “Ma, I can’t hear you. Everyone else is talking!” But even she was able to figure it out.
That must have been an incredible experience for you—seeing firsthand how Zoom was helping in healthcare, telehealth, education, and just connecting families during an impossible time.
Dani Olean Absolutely. Telehealth, connecting families, online education—Zoom really became an essential service everywhere. One of the things that really stuck with me was hiring my entire team during the pandemic. Every time I interviewed someone, I would ask, “Why Zoom?” And their answer was always the same: because Zoom made a difference.
There was this overwhelming sentiment that we weren’t just a business—we were a company that helped people, that truly cared. And even now, as we evolve beyond just meetings into an AI-first workplace platform, we’re carrying that same ethos forward.
Related Article: AI in Ecommerce: True One-on-One Personalization Is Coming
Optimizing Zoom’s Digital Experience and Checkout Flow
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire Tell me about the makeup of your team. Zoom is all about delivering the best digital experience possible—where does your team sit within that, and what are your main responsibilities?
Dani Olean Absolutely. We work within the online organization at Zoom, which is split between product and marketing. Marketing owns most of the upper funnel—campaigns and digital acquisition—but I own the pricing page, which kicks off the ecommerce checkout journey.
Since we’re one team, we work closely together to ensure a cohesive website experience. But my focus starts from pricing, through checkout, and even into the post-purchase experience. The goal is to create a seamless, self-service, and frictionless buying journey for our customers. That’s what I champion from a product development perspective.
The Evolution of Zoom’s Online Checkout
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire User experience is a huge part of this. How would you compare the state of Zoom’s checkout process today in 2025 to where it was in March, April, and May 2020? What were the biggest wins, and how did you achieve them?
Dani Olean The biggest win? Online conversion rate.
We got there through additional payment methods, personalization, and simplification. A/B testing has been huge for us—we run tests daily, and we have a best-in-class win rate. But the most impactful change? We streamlined our checkout from five steps to a single-page flow.
We also integrated Google Form Fill to remove friction—so users don’t have to manually enter addresses, for example. Every single friction point was analyzed, and we took a highly data-driven approach to solving those pain points. And of course, we always consider internationalization, since we have a large global user base.
Serving Both B2B and B2C: The Changing Face of Zoom’s Customers
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire And your biggest use case is B2B, right? Is Zoom’s online business still heavily weighted toward businesses, or is B2C still strong?
Dani Olean Actually, online is a very healthy mix of both. Many of our users from the pandemic are still with us today—some are personal users, but others fall into a category I’d call “consumer business.” People are using Zoom for church groups, HOA meetings, book clubs—gatherings that aren’t strictly personal but aren’t strictly business either.
Right now, we’re focusing on helping small businesses and micro-businesses thrive. Zoom serves companies of all sizes—from startups to enterprises—but my team is really honing in on the small business segment. These are people who wear multiple hats: they’re handling IT, finance, and operations, all while trying to focus on their actual business. My goal is to make Zoom a one-stop shop for them, where everything is seamless and easy to use—so they can focus on growing their business instead of worrying about the technology behind it.
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire So people kept their Zoom accounts but got rid of their pandemic dogs? That’s the human race for you. Poor dogs. I don’t get it. I kept all five—rabbits and all!
Leveraging AI to Improve Efficiency and Collaboration
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire That transformation is just incredible. I appreciate you sharing that. You mentioned the buzzword—AI. How is AI truly helping you, your team, and the business? Where is it being infused to help outcomes?
Dani Olean Well, let me start with some of Zoom’s AI solutions, because I use them daily. Right now, there’s a three-day quarterly business review happening. It’s a team I work closely with, and I need to stay informed. But I don’t have three days to sit in meetings. So what do I do? AI generates a full meeting summary for me—including key topics, action items, and follow-ups. I can review it quickly and tag team members for next steps. Simple, efficient, and effective.
Another major use case—sometimes I have 15 back-to-back meetings in a day. If I join a meeting late, I don’t want to be the person asking, “Hey, can someone catch me up?” AI solves that. I type into my AI companion, “What was just discussed?” and it instantly gives me key bullet points. Now I can contribute intelligently without interrupting the flow.
We also have an AI-powered search bar during meetings—like ChatGPT for Zoom. If someone uses an acronym I don’t recognize, instead of asking, I just type it into the sidebar and get a definition instantly. It’s small but impactful. These tools make a huge difference in how efficiently I can work.
AI’s Role in Automating Workflows
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire I think that’s why AI was created—to help us keep up, pay attention, and remember everything for us.
Dani Olean Exactly. Though I’m still waiting for AI to submit my POs for me. That would be life-changing. But with the rise of agentic AI, I’m optimistic!
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire So it’s really helping in the efficiency realm. With your workload, back-to-back meetings—how could you even retain all that information without AI?
Dani Olean Or think of it this way—I can be in one meeting, but my AI-generated meeting summary lets me “attend” another at the same time. I can stay informed without physically being in two places at once.
Capturing Customer Feedback: A Data-Driven Approach
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire One of the big things we talked about earlier was Zoom’s massive growth in early 2020. How does customer feedback factor into your team’s work? What methods are you using—NPS, CSAT, voice of the customer? A lot of our listeners struggle with figuring out how to harness all that customer data.
Dani Olean Love this question—I could go on for days! First, we look at both qualitative and quantitative data. You start with one, then validate with the other.
Quantitative data tells us where issues may be. In e-commerce, I analyze our funnel: Who enters checkout? Who abandons? Who completes? My three key metrics are:
- Funnel entries – How many people start the checkout process?
- Average order value – What is the average spend per customer?
- Conversion rate – What percentage of users complete the purchase?
Multiplying conversion rate by average order value gives me the average spend per person. But beyond that, I look at drop-off points. If 50% of people abandon from step one to step two, that may be expected because they’re price-checking. But if 70% drop off at the payment step—that’s a red flag. Why would people abandon so late in the process?
That’s where qualitative data comes in. Instead of blindly A/B testing, I gather customer feedback to understand the “why” behind the data. We’re always balancing both sides—metrics tell us there’s a problem, but customer insights help us solve it efficiently.
Related Article: 3 Must-Follow Rules for Customer Feedback Before Launch
Using Customer Feedback to Drive Product Improvements
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire Customer feedback plays a huge role in e-commerce success. How are you capturing and utilizing that feedback? What are your methods—surveys, interviews, behavioral analytics?
Dani Olean We take a blended approach of qualitative and quantitative data. If I see a significant drop-off on a checkout step, I want to talk to those customers. That might mean integrating a survey, sending a follow-up email, or directly reaching out for an interview. I need to understand why they abandoned—was it tax confusion, payment method issues, or an error on the page?
Once I gather themes from customer feedback, I form a hypothesis. If multiple people mention payment method issues, that’s my first test. If tax complexity comes up frequently, that’s another. We then A/B test these hypotheses—half of our audience sees one version, half sees another—to determine if our fix resolves the issue. If not, we move on to the next hypothesis.
We’re also continuously surveying customers using Qualtrics, and every month, we conduct interviews with 10 active and 10 churned customers from each key product line. But the challenge with qualitative data is prioritization. If 10 people give 10 different responses, where do you start? That’s where we turn back to quantitative data—how often do these issues show up in our broader customer base? This combination of insights helps us take a data-driven approach to improving the customer journey.
Balancing Qualitative and Quantitative Insights
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire Yeah, and then you match that with the quantitative data. Like, okay, we heard these things in interviews—what does the data tell us? Is this an issue for 20 customers or 20,000? I feel like AI should be able to bridge that gap. Is that happening?
Dani Olean Not yet, but I see the vision! Right now, stitching qualitative and quantitative data together is still a very manual process. There’s no seamless way to tie customer quotes to hard numbers. But I do see AI playing a role in that future.
For businesses that don’t have direct access to customers, the next best thing is talking to customer-facing teams. Support reps, customer success managers (CSMs), and frontline agents hear feedback every day. If you can’t speak to customers, go to the people who do.
Cross-Department Collaboration: Ecommerce and Customer Support
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire That’s an interesting point—collaborating between e-commerce and contact center teams. What does that look like for you? Monthly reports, meetings, casual check-ins?
Dani Olean It depends. If we’re launching a change that might cause friction—like recently enforcing premium service deactivations for unpaid accounts—we proactively inform our support team. We ask them to track customer reactions and share feedback. That’s more of an informal data-gathering process.
Outside of that, we have regular check-ins where we analyze support ticket trends. We review response times, resolution rates, and CSAT scores. This has led to direct product improvements. For example, we discovered through support tickets that our password recovery process was flawed—there was no confirmation step, leading to accidental password resets. That insight helped us implement a validation step, reducing the issue entirely.
Similarly, adding email verification came from analyzing support requests. These small fixes make a big difference in reducing customer frustration and improving self-service capabilities.
Seamless Integrations Enhance Customer Experience
Dom Nicastro, CMSWire One of my favorite features is the integration with Google Calendar. Setting up a Zoom meeting, having it automatically appear on the invitee’s calendar—huge time-saver. Bravo for that integration!
Dani Olean Thanks! We’re always looking at how we can make the experience smoother and more intuitive. Features like that are simple but powerful in making workflows more efficient for users.
