TaskHuman’s engineering team enhances service delivery with Zoom’s Video SDK

Founded in 2017, TaskHuman’s mission is to organize the world’s human expertise and make it instantly accessible to its customers through 1:1 personalized video calls. TaskHuman’s specialists are health, well-being, self, and professional-development experts in over 1000 topics of professional and personal areas providing users with direct 1:1 guidance and support to help them reach their goals and better their lives.

Whether it’s learning more about physical fitness, career development, or work-life balance, TaskHuman enables organizations to support the professional and personal lives of their employees. And with over 1,000 topics to choose from, employees have the support they need to pursue their health and well-being goals. 

The challenge with unreliable video 

TaskHuman leverages video software developer kits (SDKs) to integrate video into their health and well-being application and connect users around the world. However, the organization’s legacy SDK solution from their current solution couldn’t provide the reliable and frictionless experience it needed, requiring TaskHuman to invest significant resources into identifying and fixing issues.  

“We were having unreliable call connectivity – calls failing to connect, the audio not working or the video wasn’t working,” said Daniel Mazzella, Chief Technology Officer at TaskHuman. “A good percentage of calls were having issues, and it was hard to figure out if the issue was on our side or our [SDK] provider’s side. Because of this man of our sprints and rewrites were just trying to figure out where the problem was happening and how we could fix it. We spent a lot of time working on the video calling piece trying to improve it.”

The reliability gaps became even more apparent when TaskHuman began to expand globally, as it required a solution that could operate effectively in low-bandwidth environments. 

“It was really when we started to expand globally, that we started to encounter issues,” Mazzella said. “A lot of these issues were caused by the network degrading, the call would just kind of freeze up. Either the customer would end the call because it completely froze up or it would just drop the call because the internet connection wasn’t strong enough. I would say about 50% of our calls happen around the world, and re remaining 50% in the US. Our customers would say, ‘Hey, we will sign this agreement, but we have employees in all of these other countries that need to be equally supported.”

TaskHuman was also eager to improve its internal monitoring of call data to improve service delivery to customers and streamline operations. 

“We were really looking for an API so that we can automate it so every time a call and a few minutes later, we can make a rest API call to get the session duration, see how long each participant was in, and other information,” Mazzella said. 

A seamless transition to a new solution

TaskHuman made the switch to Zoom’s Video SDK at the beginning of 2021 to improve the reliability of its video functionality. TaskHuman and its teams were able to make a seamless transition to Zoom’s video SDK without any interruption to its services.

“During implementation, we still had our legacy solution operating as it was before, and we implemented Zoom’s Video SDK at the same time to easily switch between the two,” Mazzella said. “That gave us the ability to push the application to production, and when all of our users had a chance to update their application to the latest version, we were able to flip the switch on the server-side and switch over to Zoom.”

“A lot of the Zoom SDK is plug and play, so we were able to start plugging in the Zoom callbacks,” Mazella added. “The documentation was great, especially for a relatively new product at the time, and it was very easy to implement.”

Transforming service delivery with Zoom

TaskHuman noticed an immediate improvement in the quality and reliability of its video communications with customers, even in low-bandwidth environments, reducing the number of support requests the team received. 

“When we first made the switch, we were getting a lot of feedback that was along the lines of, ‘I don’t know what you changed, but keep it up,’ ” Mazella said. “And so, the number of issues that were coming in through our concierge channel has decreased quite significantly since the implementation. Zoom automatically adjusts when the network connection is not as strong, and definitely provides everything that we need in a video calling application, especially when we’re doing a custom implementation, like the Video SDK.”

The teams at TaskHuman also leverage the Video SDK’s in-session chat functionality to share important updates and information to customers during video calls, creating a streamlined customer experience. 

“When something happens on the consumer side — for instance, the consumer’s network degrades and the quality drops down — we’ll use our chat to send a message to the other participants that informs them that the provider is currently experiencing a poor network connection,” Mazzella said.

Even though Zoom’s Video SDK initially lacked some features that TaskHuman needed to streamline internal operations, Mazzella and his teams were able to work with Zoom to make those features a reality, including the creation of an API. 

“The [Zoom] team was really great with listening to feedback and hearing feature requests and suggestions from us, and because of that we were able to start incorporating some of the features that we were missing,” Mazzella said. “When that REST API was made available, Zoom definitely made a lot of people on my team very happy.”

With Zoom, TaskHuman was empowered to create a customer experience that meets the organization’s high standards, all without compromising or delaying service delivery or internal operations. As TaskHuman continues to grow, Zoom will play a critical role in maintaining the company’s reputation for exceptional customer service and creating connections between TaskHuman’s advisers and users around the world. 

“Zoom’s video calling is basically the world standard. It’s used very widely, especially during the pandemic and the Video SDK is using the same infrastructure,” Mazzella said. “When our customers call in they don’t know what the calling platform is on the back end. As far as they know TaskHuman developed it, so when we have calling issues, it typically is blamed on TaskHuman and that makes us look terrible. After implementing Zoom our users started having a more streamlined experience which also helps the overall TaskHuman brand.”