Today, Zoom announced the availability of its omnichannel CCaaS offering, Zoom Contact Center, formerly known as Zoom Video Engagement Center.
Revealed at Zoomtopia in fall 2021, the Zoom Video Engagement Center was a customer-care tool that allowed enterprises to connect with customers through video, as
reported in this article. Now, with the rebranded Zoom Contact Center, enterprises can use the contact center tool to communicate over voice channels (in addition to video), and SMS and webchat channel support is currently in beta, as Heidi Elmore, head of UCaaS for Zoom, told No Jitter.
Zoom Contact Center is integrated into the Zoom experience and comes with over 100 agent, supervisor, and admin features at launch. In terms of the admin features available, Zoom Contact Center provides a drag-and-drop IVR designer and tools to create menus, greetings, and prompts directly from the Zoom Admin portal. Additionally, enterprises can integrate Zoom chat and video capabilities into existing websites via a contact center SDK, Elmore said.
Zoom’s ambitions to enter the contact center market were no secret: last year, the cloud video provider attempted to acquire Five9. While
Five9 shareholders ultimately nixed the deal, it doesn’t appear to have slowed down the company from continuing its contact center push.
When asked about Zoom entering the CCaaS market at this moment, Elmore noted that several things factored into the decision, including Zoom customers looking for simplicity in their contact center service and the potential market growth as represented by organizations needing to move to the cloud in the coming years. "Many folks have gone through this digital transformation over the last few years, but there's still a lot more to go," Elmore said. "And for many organizations, that first foray into digital transformation is indeed the front door, which is managed by the contact center."
In terms of finding the resources to build out the contact centers service, Elmore pointed out that Zoom already had a lot of expertise in-house to make it happen, given
its Zoom Phone product. “In many ways, phone and contact center are two sides of the same coin ... and that expertise lived within Zoom already,” Elmore said.
Looking to the future of Zoom Contact Center, Elmore said that the product has a 12-month roadmap, which will see different contact center personas capabilities, like workforce manager and workforce analyst, added over time. Additionally, Zoom is looking at ways to use AI to improve agent productivity and will add more workforce management and customer relationship management integrations, Elmore added.
Currently, Zoom Contact Center is available in the U.S. and Canada, with more international availability coming later this year, Zoom said. Zoom Contact Center runs about $70 per agent per month and is also available on a usage-based model, according to an industry analyst.
Elmore also said Zoom will maintain relationships with its current contact center partners, including Five9, Genesys, NICE, Talkdesk, and Twilio, even as it builds out its contact center capabilities.
