Zoom’s Omnichannel Contact Center Packs a Punch

Zoom took everything you love about meetings, video, phone and chat, and upped the ante by launching its own contact center. Currently you can utilize webchat, SMS, voice and video channels. It is a perfect fit for those customers in the mid-market contact center space looking to modernize their digital experiences with their customers.

The beauty of Zoom’s contact center is that it takes the same video-first approach to the platform and brings it into the contact center space. This means the rich video experiences you love in Zoom meetings are coming to the contact center platform. The foundations of the contact center are built on the same stable and trusted platform on which Zoom has successfully deployed voice and meetings. 

One compelling offering is the ability to deploy a widget on your website that allows a customer to simply click and be connected face-to-face with an agent. It’s nice to have a video-first focus in a very traditional audio-only contact center world.

Zoom’s contact center might be video first, but by no means has it left out the voice or other channels. Traditional voice services along with SMS and webchat help round out the contact center offering in its current form. The contact center functionality is part of the same Zoom app that you have come to love. There’s no need to deploy additional software to your users to utilize the contact center feature sets; analytics and dashboards are in this initial offering as well. Typically in the contact center space, the ability to launch a beautiful wallboard on a secondary monitor or large centralized display is something that can only be done with add-on products.  

I also love how Zoom has integrated management of the contact center into its same admin interface. It is easy to deploy a flow using a graphical drag-and-drop interface. There’s no complex coding needed to deploy a script. 

Did I also mention it has basic speech recognition built in as well? Zoom added features that pack the most punch for its customers. It’s also great that you don’t have to utilize Zoom Phone to power this contact center. It is a separate entity from Zoom Phone, which is perfect for those customers looking to move only their contact center workflows to the cloud.

Does it have every contact center feature on day one? No. For instance, workforce management is not part of the current product offering. If you are looking for that feature and are a current Zoom Phone customer, you might need to look somewhere else, such as a Five9. If WFO is not a deal breaker, I’d give Zoom contact center a chance because it will continue to enhance the product over the coming months.

In this initial offering, Zoom has put a lot of thought into what customers are looking for in an omnichannel contact center. I appreciate the thought and care put into the development of the solution to hit most of the marks on what customers want. Webchat, SMS, analytics (including dashboards), voice and video channels are all there on day one, in an easy-to-use admin interface. In a world of complexity, it is nice to have something that simply works. Zoom is only getting started, and I look for them to be a major challenger in the contact center market in 2022 and beyond.

Story by Corey Buskirk, a technical architect at CDW with more than 11 years of experience in collaboration solutions.