Zoom Launches New Contact Center CX Offering: The New Solution Is Video Optimized and Has Unified Communications Capabilities

March 22nd, 2022 Alex Gaw Leave a comment

Four months after failing on a multibillion-dollar bid to acquire a call center platform, video conferencing company Zoom now has its own contact center solution that is optimized for video interaction with customers, combined with unified communications (UC) capabilities to support its employees working as customer service agents.

Zoom Contact Center, the company’s new offering, goes beyond the traditional contact center emphasis on the voice channel, Zoom said in a company blog that announced the new product. Instead, the solution is optimized for video interaction with customers based on the idea that visual engagement enhances CX, enabling supportive and empathetic conversations that consolidate customer interactions. The contact center solution already has more than 100 agent, supervisor, and contact center administrator features at launch, the company noted, with preparations underway for the solution to include additional features like webchat and mobile text messaging, currently under beta testing.

Future investments will center on building more communication channels for the solution and on integrating functionality related to customer relationship management (CRM), workforce management, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML), all aimed at maximizing agent productivity.

The launch of the Zoom Contact Center comes after the surprise collapse in October last year of Zoom’s $14.7 billion bid to acquire Five9, the communications platform provider headquartered in San Ramon, California. The acquisition, if successful, would have provided Zoom with greater access to business clients in the global cloud contact center market, projected to be worth tens of billions of dollars in a few years’ time. The all-stock tender fell apart at the 11^th hour, rejected by Five9 shareholders who said the deal significantly undervalued Five9 stock at the same time that Zoom’s own stock value had fallen because of slowing growth.

Also contributing to the transaction’s disintegration was a US Department of Justice (DOJ) review on how the acquisition might impact America’s national security interests, given that a portion of Zoom’s research and development (R&D) personnel was located in China. After the acquisition attempt failed, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said the company would return with its own contact center solution sometime in early 2022.

The solution’s new UC capabilities will enable agents to work from any location and to collaborate more easily with one another, as contact center communications are brought into a central hub. An integrated contact center experience increases employee collaboration and productivity, while helping organizations remove the barriers that cause teams to work in silos, Zoom remarked. With its ability to incorporate voice calling, video conferencing, instant messaging (IM), and other enterprise communication tools into a single, streamlined interface, UC technology provides users with easy and immediate access to the tools from any physical location and digital device.

Blair Pleasant, co-founder of BCStrategies, an industry resource for enterprises, vendors, and system integrators in the UC business, said Zoom understands the importance of bringing UC and a multichannel contact center into the same experience.

“Zoom is known for great video, which is important for high-touch customer scenarios and internal use cases like IT help desk, employee helpline, and revenue-generating activities,” Pleasant said. “But the fact that Zoom Contact Center supports routing, additional channels, and the agent functionality organizations need, means that Zoom Contact Center could become the modern contact center solution of choice.”

Zoom said the new solution is now ready for use in the US and Canada, with availability to other countries slated for later this year.

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Technology Gives Remote Workers A Way To Communicate, But Something Is Missing

February 17th, 2021 Clint Padgett Leave a comment

Ready for that first one-on-one chat with your boss in 2021?

If you’re like many employees across the country, you may have begun the new year the same way you ended the old one – communicating via Zoom, Google Chat, email, text messages or some other venue where you and the other person were physically apart.

That might work all right for a quick exchange of basic information. But it’s not the best way to handle more complicated information or to build esprit de corps within a team, says Clint Padgett (www.clintonmpadgett.com), president and CEO of Project Success Inc. and the ForbesBooks author of How Teams Triumph: Managing By Commitment.

“One of the fundamental components to successful teamwork is communication,” Padgett says. “If you can’t talk to your team, you can’t be successful. And the key to developing communication is face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball conversation. That’s how you pass along complex information and build relationships.”

But what’s ideal and what’s reality don’t always match up. In 2020, many office workers saw less and less of each other in person as the pandemic forced them to work remotely, and that trend could pick up steam rather than fizzle out even when the pandemic is over, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

Pew surveyed people whose work responsibilities could be done from home. Prior to the pandemic, just 20 percent had worked remotely all or part of the time. Now, 71 percent of those workers are doing their job from home all or most of the time. And more than half – 54 percent – say that if given a choice they would want to keep working from home even after the pandemic.

Padgett winces at the idea of remote work as a long-term solution, but says it’s incumbent on managers and employees to find ways to make it work. One way is to understand the communication limitations that must be overcome.

“The way we communicate remotely – with email, text messages, Zoom calls – doesn’t replace face-to-face meetings and the relationships you develop with people when you can sit down in the same room and have a conversation,” he says. “Communication and conversation are not the same thing.”

Email and text messages are a series of one-way communications, not dialogue, he says. Yes, there can be back and forth, but not in the same way as an in-person conversation. And remote work doesn’t allow those breakroom chats where team members build their relationships and their rapport.

At least for now, though, remote work is a reality, so Padgett offers a few tips and some cautionary advice:

Work to overcome technology’s communications limits. Technology is great for a lot of things, but when you communicate with emojis or by using the fewest words possible, your message can be unclear, Padgett says. “If I ask you a question by email or text, and your response is a smiley-face emoji, that could mean any number of things,” he says. “Be honest, how many times have you misinterpreted the tone of an email or a static document?” Skip the emojis in workplace communications and strive to make your communications as clear as possible. Put yourself in the other person’s place. If you received this text or email, would you understand the context without more explanation?

Set up clear, two-way communications. The only way to manage a project effectively is to develop the project around clear two-way conversations, Padgett says. “One-way communications should only be used for simple, clear questions that have yes/no answers or are used to piggyback on conversations,” he says. “In other words, it’s okay to text or email questions before a conversation takes place or for follow-up responses afterward. Conversations need not be the only form of communication, but they are the most important by far.” While video chats have their own limitations, at least they provide an opportunity to engage in that needed dialogue.

Appreciate technology; value people. Many managers (and others in an organization) may approach communication from a technical standpoint because they want software to be the answer, Padgett says. “But it isn’t the answer, it’s a tool,” he says. “Technically, communications on a project could happen electronically, but if you choose technology over people, your project won’t be successful. While your communications will be fast, you’ll sacrifice quality, clarity, accountability, and, ultimately, success.”

“Conversations force clarity that you don’t get with other forms of communication,” Padgett says.“For nearly a year, businesses have tried to duplicate those face-to-face conversations through Zoom or Google Chat, and that will continue for the foreseeable future. We all need to devote serious effort to making it work. But at the same time, the question we will continue to grapple with is this: Is a conversation conducted on a screen as meaningful and productive as an in-person conversation?”

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Clint Padgett (www.clintonmpadgett.com), the ForbesBooks author of How Teams Triumph: Managing By Commitment, is the president and CEO of Project Success Inc., a project management company. He holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from The Georgia Institute of Technology and an MBA from The Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

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COVID-19, Remote Work, and Technology: Was 2020 just a blip?

January 30th, 2021 Heinan Landa, Founder & CEO, Optimal Networks Leave a comment

How did 2020 reshape your business?

While some organizations were better prepared for a shift to working from home, only 14% of businesses worldwide had fully remote workforces prior to the pandemic.

This means that, at some level, 86% of us had to make sudden, rapid changes to adjust to an entirely remote way of operating, communicating, and leading.

As Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella put it last April: “We’ve seen two years’ worth of digital transformation in two months. From remote teamwork and learning to sales and customer service, to critical cloud infrastructure and security—we are working alongside customers every day to help them adapt and stay open for business in a world of remote everything.”

Now that vaccines are beginning to roll out and the prospect of returning to our offices becomes more tangible, the next question we face is this: Which elements of 2020 will stick, and which will we discard as soon as it’s safe to do so?

COVID-19 ushered in 6 primary changes to the way we work

The most obvious change to our work environments is that we made a quick shift to remote work—with varying levels of disruption and success. If we zoom in a bit closer, we can pull out six major changes:

1 – We embraced collaboration tools.

Microsoft Teams has seen a 160% increase in users from March to October, Slack sold for $27.7 billion, and Gartner predicts the worldwide market for social collaboration tools to reach $4.8 billion by 2023. While these tools were plenty popular pre-pandemic, many businesses found themselves without a way to communicate with a fully remote team and quickly implemented one package or another (or, in some cases, multiple packages).

2 – Live document coauthoring finally got our attention.

With “old school” collaboration methods off the table, we finally jumped head-first into tools that many of us already had access to, but weren’t really using—namely Microsoft SharePoint and Google Drive. Instead of emailing documents back and forth or trying to whiteboard over Zoom, we posted links in our new Slack or Teams channels and edited our project simultaneously.

3 – Video conferencing exploded.

Between Zoom (up to 300 million daily participants), Teams (up to 115 million daily users), and Google Meet (up to 100 million daily participants), we were on so many video calls last year. In fact, we spent so much time using these tools that “Zoom fatigue” became a thing we say in real life. The market for these tools is expected to hit $50 billion by 2026.

4 – Virtual events… happened.

All of our networking, fundraising, recruiting, team building, and client appreciation events went virtual. We tried webinars virtual conferences, virtual happy hours, virtual magic shows, and on and on and on. These, from anecdotal evidence, were better than nothing, but generally hit or miss.

5 – We stopped caring so much about where employees and new hires live.

If we’re all working from home, “home” can be anywhere. With 70% of company owners open to letting their employees work remotely after offices can safely reopen, we open the door to hiring the best talent regardless of their geographic location. There are a few hurdles to clear when it comes to expanding your company’s footprint (taxes and healthcare, for example), but we’ve quashed all concerns about effective remote work.

6 – We took less time off and burned out more.

Lastly, the combination of working from home and diving into applications that generate notifications 24/7 has further blurred the lines between “work” and “home.” A recent Monster survey found that 69% of workers are feeling burnout, 59% are (still) taking less time off than they normally would, and 42% don’t plan to take any time off.

So, which of these trends should we expect to stay for the long haul? Which will go? Here’s my take.

Trends that will stick through 2021 and beyond

When it comes to practices that boost efficiency and expand access to something as invaluable as top talent, few businesses will scrap them.

We’ll stick with video conferencing. In the first few months post-vaccine, many of us will have been so starved for in-person meetings that we’ll schedule as many as we can. Over time, however, I suspect we’ll find a happy medium and balance video conferencing with face-to-face meetings—perhaps opting to make new connections in person and maintain them over video. This balance will be of particular value to those of us in metropolitan areas, where one hour-long meeting chews up half a day with traffic!

Document collaboration won’t budge. Once your teammates (and your clients!) have gotten a taste of how much more efficient real-time collaboration is, there will be no going back. It won’t be a matter of whether we keep this solution, but how we bolster it with the right policies and security measures.

Slack and Teams won’t either. We’ll see a new trend of businesses getting smarter with how they use Slack and Teams—and in cases where employees jumped into multiple platforms as a stop-gap, there will (should!) be some consolidation. But overall, we won’t be turning down the tools that have such power to amplify productivity and engagement.

We’ll expand our recruiting efforts. As long as a particular role does not explicitly require feet on the ground at or our office or at client sites, most of us will be much more willing to let go of geographic restrictions on our job postings in an effort to find the absolute best fit.

Trends most businesses will abandon post-vaccine

In other cases, our businesses will be happy to revert back to traditional approaches:

We won’t ditch our offices (at least not yet). Few of us are going to follow in Twitter’s footsteps and go all virtual all the time; we have years left on our leases, and will get our money’s worth once we can do so safely. When that lease is set to expire we’ll have a big decision to make as far as remote work is concerned. Even then, the majority of larger businesses plan to perhaps downsize, but ultimately keep a brick-and-mortar office as we still see value in the happenstance interactions and energy generated by working together in person.

Goodbye, virtual happy hours! To the business community’s credit, we have been getting extremely creative with virtual events that are fun and engaging. But once we can opt for an in-person happy hour versus a virtual happy hour, or a live lunch-and-learn versus a webinar… the choice becomes a no-brainer.

Hello, vacations! Finally—and thankfully—we’ll resume traveling and being more protective of our time “off the clock” once our options open up. This will be a welcome chance for our folks to step back from the many hardships that we’ve faced over the past year, rest, and reenergize.

Final thought

While these are my predictions on how these trends will fare over time, now is the time to crystalize the vision of what the future of your business looks like. Work with your leadership team sooner rather than later to address the following:

1. What is your stance on remote work post-vaccine, and how will you communicate that to your team?

2. How will you make sure you’re getting the most out of your collaboration tools?

3. What is your policy on file sharing, and does it take backup and security into proper account?

4. What guidelines will you set for video conferencing as communication, sales, and engagement tool?

5. Will you change your approach to networking, events, and celebrations?

6. Will you set geographic limitations on your hiring efforts?

7. What message do you need to send regarding after-hours and weekend work? Vacation?

We’re fortunate to be in a place where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel with regard to the pandemic. But even if we abandon some of our COVID-era trends in favor of more “normal” alternatives, the impact of 2020 on our businesses will not be undone.

We embraced new tools. We found new efficiencies. We know remote work works.

Why go backwards?

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Navigating the Dynamics of a Split Office

May 13th, 2020 Matt Martin Leave a comment

Experts are divided over when workers will get back to the office after COVID-19. Google is looking at June 1st at the earliest. A report from the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University recommends holding out until August. But both Google and Harvard agree that the return should be staggered in order to protect workers.

The Harvard report recommends starting by letting 20% of at-home workers back into the office. Start with a few days per week and then expand to five days as testing ramps up.

Not only does working in shifts reduce office density, but it also prevents overcrowding on sidewalks and mass transit. But it also comes with challenges, including the fact that some workers will feel less connected to the rest of the company. Here are three tips for keeping workers safer, happier, and more productive as companies transition into a split office setup.

Don’t rush everyone back

While you may be tempted to get everyone you can into the office at least some of the time, that’s not really necessary.

“We may see some companies realize they can run their businesses effectively with a much smaller office and many people working largely from home,” said Elizabeth Brink, principal at global design and architecture firm Gensler. Dr. Anna Tavis, academic director of the Human Capital Management Department at the NYU School of Professional Studies also predicts that many people will continue working from home indefinitely. “We kind of assume that collaboration means physical presence in one place,” Tavis said. “But now we’ve learned that’s not the case.” Indeed, the average company sees a 10% to 43% increase in productivity after going fully remote. And in a recent survey, 54% of workers said their productivity had improved since working from home full-time and 64% said their work quality has improved.

Google won’t require workers with caretaking responsibilities or other special considerations to come into the office. You may also want to encourage workers who live with healthcare workers or “essential” workers to stay home. The Harvard report recommends bringing workers who have recently tested negative and show immunity in reliable antibody tests back into the office first.

Get everyone on the same page

Now is the ideal time to invest in project management software. If you wait until some people are back in the office, the drive to have everyone use it will be diminished since some employees will once again be able to walk over to a coworker’s desk to get a status update on an ongoing project.

Plus, project management software can help mitigate Zoom fatigue. Project management software serves as your team’s source of truth when it comes to each project’s updates, statuses, assignees, due dates, files, and more. Examples include Asana, Notion, Trello, Monday, and Basecamp. Pre-set notifications and reminders for due dates and changes mean you spend less time Slacking people about who’s doing what and more time making progress. Project management software that offers visibility into others’ schedules, tasks, and workloads can be especially helpful for partially remote teams.

You may not even need to invest in new software, but just better leverage what you already use.

“We found that it’s not so much about needing new tools but instead, leveraging existing tools to foster greater collaboration during quarantine,” Corporate Recruiter Lauren Munroe said about her team’s use of SharePoint and Microsoft Teams to collaborate on projects simultaneously since moving to WFH.

Get chatting

Speaking of Slack, if your team doesn’t already have a chat app, now’s the time! For similar reasons, you don’t want to wait until some teammates are able to talk things through in-person to encourage widespread adoption of chat.

Good chat software lets you send and thread instant messages to individuals and groups. It’s also nice to be able to search chats and snooze notifications. Other examples include Hangouts, Glip, and Twist. The ability to start a video call inside the chat app is nice, as is timezone awareness if your team is distributed. Some apps allow you to set your status so colleagues know when you’re busy or free, in a meeting, or it’s outside your work hours.

A chat app can also help you re-create some of what’s great about being in the office. After moving to WFH, Chief People Officer Meighan Newhouse created new chat channels for this purpose. “Water cooler” is for workers to check in and share updates. “Lock-down” is where they share relatable tales from quarantine. VP of People Carrie Pinkham added a “CEO,” “wellness,” and “family Fridays” channel. The last is “where employees post old and new pictures of loved ones, which seemed fitting during this time. We added new tools like Donut to pair employees for get-to-know-you chats,” Meighan said.

If you’re a Slack user, get the most out of it by syncing your Slack status with your Google Calendar.

Set up video conferencing

Speaking of video calls, video conferencing software is obviously a must. Chats and phone calls are great, but there’s nothing like seeing someone’s face in real-time. This becomes even more important when everyone is working from home. Video conferencing software makes the conversation a little bit more like you’re in the same room. Video conferencing software facilitates on-demand or pre-scheduled video conferencing among two or more people simultaneously. Generally, this software integrates with your calendar system and provides built-in screen sharing and chat functionality. Examples include Skype, Zoom, WebEx, and GoToMeeting. Facebook Messenger also recently got into the game with their Rooms product.

Since not everyone’s home internet is super fast, now’s a good time to choose video conferencing software that allows workers to call into the meeting toll-free from their phones.

Video conferencing is another good way to bring employees together for fun and camaraderie. At Clockwise we do lunch Zooms where our Office Manager Czar divides employees into smaller groups where we eat and catch up.

Share everyone’s status

It’s a good idea to have everyone, regardless of whether they’re working at home or in the office, set their working hours and add their WFH or OOO to their calendars. To easily share this information with a team, many workplaces have team calendars. Clockwise streamlines this process by adding everyone’s individual WFH or OOO to their team’s calendar automatically, so if someone forgets to update either their personal or shared calendar everyone is still on the same page.

Upgrade workers’ work from home setup

Especially since we don’t know how long some workers will have to continue working from home, it’s worth it to spend a little money to ensure they’re as productive as possible.

First, make sure everyone who’s still at home has the fastest internet possible. Have everyone measure their home internet connection speeds using services like fast.com or Speedtest. For more accurate results, the Verge recommends making sure your computer is connected to the right network instead of, for instance, your ISP’s lower-speed wireless hotspot. If workers’ speeds aren’t good, or they’re running out of data before running out of month, consider giving them some money to upgrade and/or invest in a mesh network or wifi extender. To save, check out COVID-19 deals from ISPs.

Then offer them a little money to upgrade their desk, chair, light, monitor, mouse, and keyboard. If they have that stuff at the office, let them bring it home. For example, Clockwise gave all employees $100 to buy a new chair at the start of WFH and let us bring anything we were using that we could carry home with us from the office.

Going forward

Staggering your comeback to the office can be a great way to balance the benefits of an in-office environment while still keeping employees reasonably safe. The trick is to make sure no one feels left out and everyone is able to work productively whether they’re home or at the office. Making sure you have the right technology and equipment makes all the difference.

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WITH ZOOM, WE ARE ALL TRADING IN SERVICES

April 7th, 2020 Andrea Durkin Leave a comment

New Modes of Living and Working

As we struggle to maintain continuity in our work and school lives during the pandemic, technology has come to our aid.

Those of us who work on teams spread throughout the country or the world have already unlocked the secrets of online collaboration platforms like Slack and Quip. (We use Quip at TradeVistas for project management.) Others are quickly moving to them or discovering functionality they previously overlooked in Microsoft Teams or similar business software.

“Zoom” has become a verb for online video conferencing the way Skype had been for years for international communication. The class I teach at Georgetown is completely online. (We were already extensively using the learning management system called Canvas). The university reported last week they reached a high of 1,459,100 minutes of instruction on Zoom in just one day.

Biggest Week Ever in Business App Downloads

Video conferencing apps Google Hangouts, Houseparty, Microsoft Teams and ZOOM Cloud Meetings saw major jumps in use in the United States and Europe. According to App Annie, during the week of March 15-21 alone, business apps surpassed 62 million downloads worldwide across iOS and Google Play, apparently the biggest week ever.

With the exception of middle and high schoolers hanging out on Houseparty, many of us working online are exchanging professional, technical, business and other commercial services. If your client or customer is overseas, you are likely delivering what’s called a cross-border service. No better time to appreciate this major component of global trade.

The WTO Modes of Services

In the World Trade Organization (WTO), negotiators divided up services trade into four “modes of delivery” related to where the supplier and consumer are located at the time of the transaction. In Mode 1, known as cross-border trade, the parties are in separate countries and the service is most likely provided digitally via email or through an online platform. One example is consulting services – perhaps a report delivered over email.

In Mode 2, known as consumption abroad, the consumer travels to another territory to receive the service. Examples include hospitality services associated with tourism, medical treatment, or a “semester abroad” at a foreign university. Mode 3 involves putting out a shingle to provide services in another country, known as commercial presence. Finally, in Mode 4, the service provider travels to the customer such as a software engineer working on a project overseas on a temporary visa.

Ascendant Modes of Trade in Services

Every day we engage in or benefit from some form of globally traded services, though we rarely think of it. Among the biggest traditional components of global trade in services are transport and travel – including the trains and ships that move cargo, and the planes that move people across international borders for work and tourism. We’ve written before about how important the tourism is to the global economy – global travel exports were worth $1.7 trillion in 2018.

But other less obvious components of globally traded services have grown larger in recent years. According to the WTO’s 2019 World Trade Statistical Review, the “use of intellectual property” as a service exceeded $3.1 trillion in 2018. The most dynamic services sector continues to be telecommunications, computer and information services (or ICTs), which grew more than 15 percent in 2018.

The Multiplier Effect of Digital Technologies

Telecommunications, computer and information services offer multiplier effects – they create efficiencies and infrastructure that enable new products and new services. Financial technologies bring about cashless payment systems, online platforms like Spotify enable music streaming, technologies embedded in your thermostat promote smart energy use through an app on your phone, sensors on machines inform computers when repairs may be needed. Micro-entrepreneurs sell their products globally through Etsy, eBay or Amazon Web Services.

Enterprise software, cloud computing, data processing and analytics services can help make any business more productive and profitable. They are the backbone of production, distribution and marketing of many physically traded goods while facilitating trade with customers anywhere in the world digitally.

Eighty percent of all U.S. jobs are in services-providing industries. The definition of a “tradable service” is constantly changing and expanding. In 2018, U.S. exports of ICT services alone were valued at $71.4 billion while service exports enabled by ICTs added another $451.9 billion. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates that services potentially enabled by ICTs accounted for 55 percent of total U.S. services exports. Yet the United States is fourth in globally exported ICT services, narrowly behind China, India and far behind the European Union.

The Doctor Will “See” You Now

The scourge of the COVID-19 pandemic, with its prolonged and widespread “stay at home” restrictions, is forcing all of us to shift or accelerate our digital habits. We have no choice but to buy non-essentials online. Our kids are e-learning. Doctors are seeing patients online when not critical. Graduating students will have virtual commencements. And most of us are forced into video conferencing all…the…time.

And while many people will be binge watching or gaming (WarnerMedia, Disney Plus, Netflix and Hulu all reported 65 and 70 percent jumps in number of streaming hours), some of us are trying to continue working online, despite these bandwidth hogs. Some businesses have no choice but to cope by providing virtual services – tax advisors are using secure document portals and phone consultations while fitness instructors check your form by webcam. These are stopgap measures now that might augment their businesses when things go back to “normal”.

LinkedIn With One Another

Recently, I decided to join a LinkedIn Live presentation by one of my favorite business gurus. I was astounded at the scrolling list of locations from where viewers were joining: United Kingdom, South Africa, Romania, Tunisia, Qatar, Poland, Pakistan, Jamaica, India, Colombia, Sudan, Turkey, Lebanon, Yemen and Afghanistan. On and on it went – I stopped writing them down. Nearly the entire world is experiencing the effects of the pandemic in some way, but through modern telecommunications and information technologies, we stay connected.

Those of us who can provide our global services online are the lucky ones. Our appreciation goes out to those workers who are keeping factories running to make essentials, who drive trucks and who staff pharmacies and grocery stores to ease our ability to work and learn from home, out of harm’s way.

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Andrea Durkin is the Editor-in-Chief of TradeVistas and Founder of Sparkplug, LLC. Ms. Durkin previously served as a U.S. Government trade negotiator and has proudly taught international trade policy and negotiations for the last fifteen years as an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Master of Science in Foreign Service program.

This article originally appeared on TradeVistas.org. Republished with permission.