Zoom Expands Into Customer Service With New Contact Center

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: