Popular video conferencing app Zoom is adding a new business offering: Zoom Contact Center for customer service.
It’ll have more than 100 features at launch and will cater to the agents, supervisors, and contact center administrators who all work together to address their customers’ needs.
Zoom was one of the fastest business successes of the pandemic, creating $2.6 billion in revenue in 2020 for a 317% year-over-year increase. With revenue growth comes expansion, and customer service is a natural fit for a video business software.
Zoom Contact Center
The Center can be deployed with a graphical drag-and-drop IVR designer that lets administrators craft menus, greetings, and prompts. It can integrate chat and video into an existing website as well.
Some details of the new Contact Center aren’t available yet. Support for additional channels including SMS and webchat still remain in beta, while other upcoming features include CRM and workforce management integrations, along with machine learning tools aimed at boosting agent productivity.
The service will only be available in the US and Canada at first, though additional international markets will come some time in 2022, according to Zoom.
Zoom’s existing integrations with other contact centers won’t be going anywhere, either so no customers will be forced to switch services.
Part of the Remote Work Shift?
Zoom notes in their press release that most traditional contact center agents are tied to physical locations and when they operate remotely, don’t have a central hub to group all their communications. Zoom’s hoping it can fill that niche.
“Previously, contact center infrastructure was complex to deploy, expensive to operate, and time-intensive to upgrade. Zoom Contact Center was carefully designed to meet the needs of the modern agent and end customer, both of which expect a personalized, digital, and effective contact center experience,” said Oded Gal, Chief Product Officer of Zoom.
They picked the right time. The state of the once-standard nine-to-five commute is in flux, with many workers preferring a fully remote work environment. More than 30% of respondents to one recent survey from a Stanford professor reported they preferred to stay home for the entire workweek.
Web Conferencing and Customer Support
Zoom will be competing directly with Microsoft Teams — a business software offered by a far larger company that also includes video conferencing tech with contact center integration.
It’s hard to see it going wrong for Zoom, though. After spending the first years of the pandemic building a large audience of businesses that need remote video communication, they have a great opportunity to further monetize each one by expanding their offerings. If companies already have Zoom and need a contact center, they’ll use Zoom’s. If they have Microsoft, they’ll use Microsoft.
The host of smaller web conferencing will have to settle for offering third-party integrations. If you aren’t locked into the Zoom or Microsoft ecosystems yet, we’ve put together a quick table explaining your web conferencing options:
| Price from The lowest starting price for a paid plan. The lowest price available for your business will depend on your needs. | Best for | Free plan | Breakout Rooms | Whiteboard | Audio-Conferencing | Pros | Cons | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FEATURED DEAL  | TOP RATED  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  | |
| Zoho Meeting | GoTo Meeting | Zoom | RingCentral | Webex | Google Meet | Microsoft Teams | Lifesize | BlueJeans | |
| Value | Sound and video quality | Beginners | Security | Larger businesses | Google Workspace users | Microsoft 365 users | Users that need hardware | Users that need customer support | |
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| Yes (paid plan) – VoIP, Phone & Toll-Free | Yes – VoIP, Phone & Toll-Free | Yes – Add-on audio plan allows you to add Call Out, global Toll-free & local dial-in for premium countries | Yes – Companies get a single audio conferencing bridge dial-in phone number for easy universal access. | Yes – Audio-only calls can be created when a host generates an Audio pin | Yes – Just call the number listed on the meeting invite, or join via the link and turn off your camera | Yes – but only in selected countries, and each user dialing into meetings will need an audio-conferencing license. | Yes – in a meeting contact card, users can tap the phone number under Details to call using their default phone or voice app | Yes – Easy access to audio conferencing is provided via a traditional PSTN number | |
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