BONUS DOWNLOAD: Leveraging Zoom Phone for your Organisation
Corporate communications are the lifeblood of every business. You can have the most incredible team globally and the most tech-savvy developers/designers/programmers/etc. On staff, but if your communication channels are blocked, then your business is as good as dead.
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, organisations slowly started to acknowledge the importance of this function. Improved workplace communication is one of the few positive things to come out of the pandemic. In pre-covid times, corporate communication hardly got the attention it deserved until the moment of crisis hits. But undervaluing the importance of robust communication is a mistake, and it costs some companies dearly.
The soft skill of communication is undervalued in corporations because it’s difficult to measure. The skill “requires a high tolerance of ambiguity, contradiction, and subtlety (i.e., softness), according to communications expert Walter G. Montgomery. It doesn’t help that business schools place corporate communications among heavy-duty statistics and accounting courses, hardly giving the topic the time and attention it merits.
Broken communication channels have been the downfall to many a corporation. The truth is that the way an organisation communicates can be the difference between success and failure.
Fortunately, some companies are taking note and responding accordingly. Another fortunate turn of events is that businesses today have a vast choice of communication tools and video conferencing software. But none is as popular and widely loved as Zoom.
Zoom offers organisations of all industries and sizes with a robust video meetings platform to flexibly scale to fit any user count and budget. But one of the coolest parts of the popular software is the new iterations such as Zoom phone. The lighter and mobile version of the platform can have a tangible impact on small businesses and large enterprises.
With video becoming the norm for communications, Zoom phone opens new ways to stay connected anywhere, any time. The cloud phone app enables higher engagement, stronger relationships, and faster decision-making among remote teams.
According to Frost and Sullivan, over 88% of C-level decision-makers say that video makes meetings more effective, 84% say it reduces meeting times, 86% say it accelerates decision-making, and 83% say it improves productivity. Thus, the video-centric approach of the Zoom phone answers a growing demand in the market.
Available as an add-on to Zoom’s video communications suite, the cloud phone system brings new features to the table. Zoom phone supports inbound, and outbound calling through the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and seamlessly integrated traditional telephony features.
It will enable customers to replace their existing PBX solution and consolidate their business communication and collaboration requirements into their favourite video service. Zoom Phone was made available for North American customers in the first quarter of 2019, with support now available for 44 countries worldwide.
BONUS DOWNLOAD: Leveraging Zoom Phone for your Organisation
Zoom’s rich set of APIs and cross-platform SDKs power more than 100 million API engagements per month. Given the rise of API integrations, this is indispensable for SMBs and enterprises. The integrations are built by Zoom and third-party developers, making it easy for customers and developers to extend Zoom’s product portfolio with new functionalities.
Zoom marketplace contains many categories, including Assistants, Productivity, Scheduling, and Unified Log-In. The marketplace features apps and bots from companies such as Clara Labs, Egnyte, HubSpot, Hugo, Microsoft Teams, Otter.ai, Slack, and Theta Lake.
In addition to Zoom Phone, Zoom Room’s new features allow multiple uses to simultaneously share content on displays, making for a richer, more seamless collaboration experience. On the Zoom Rooms Controller, users can manage how the content gets distributed across the room’s displays.
The proximity detection component allows users to start a Zoom Rooms meeting by clicking a button on their Zoom mobile app. It’s the perfect solution for hosting ad-hoc meetings from any conference room. Zoom released support in 2019 for this feature.
In addition to these upgrades that make Zoom Phone quite convenient to use, Zoom is offering several new enhancements to its cloud phone to maximise user experience, flexibility, and security:
Virtual Backgrounds: Zoom is improving its virtual backgrounds to work without a green screen.
Audio Signature: When enabled, this security feature embeds each VoIP user’s credentials/identity into their unique audio track. If a participant leaks the audio from your meeting, it will get traced back to them.
Headset Controls: Users can control their Zoom meetings via their headset – including join, leave, mute, unmute, and volume. Now available for some Jabra and Plantronics headset models; more models and providers to follow.
All in all, the Zoom phone is a new tool for video conferencing that caters to the specific requirements of enterprise communications. We know where the future is, but we have to make sure we lead our companies there. The technology landscape continues to evolve at an ever-increasing pace, and Zoom phone is at the forefront of these efforts.
If you'd like to find out more why not download our guide Leveraging Zoom Phone for your Organisation?