While the list of (new) customers is nice. The future for Zoom is the continuation of their creation of a Platform.
The Contact Center is a critical part of the customer lifecycle for any organization. A company has to master connecting a customer with a request to the best possible representative to handle their question/concern/opportunity.
Genesys was one of the first to change the dynamic from an extremely expensive, hardware based platform to route calls. Genesys pioneered the software based routing. And then made the logical next step, to the cloud. Transitions are never easy. Companies did not want to simply throw away their investment in hardware.
And here comes the next wave – the video call can now be handled with all the benefits of the contact center – routing, measurements, recording, cataloging, searching, transfer, training.
Think of the use cases – go ahead, be a visionary!
- Telemedicine – duh (but now it can be productive/efficient
- Insurance claims? I’m calling you from my roof. I’m calling you from my driveway.
- Police – I am calling you from a robbery of a 7-11
- Plumber – my hot water heater is leaking from the top. You know, right next to the valve thingy
“To accelerate adoption, the companies are engaging in a joint go-to-market strategy. Full availability for the integrations is expected during the second quarter of 2020. To learn more, attend the webinar titled, Genesys + Zoom: Seamless cloud communications for great customer experiences.”
That’s right, it’s available in Q2 (read - very soon)
25 Likes
Thanks for the update. When I posted this from softwarestackinvesting.com a few weeks ago I didn’t hope that such an integration would happen so fast: it’s a free site so here is my favorite part again.
Opportunity. Zoom has the underpinnings for a platform offering, but hasn’t gone to the point of fully enabling developers to build stand-alone collaboration applications. Twilio offers this capability in their programmable video product. They highlight a recent customer example with Doctor on Demand, which used the programmable video service to power their telehealth app. Given Zoom’s extensive reach currently, reputation for high quality service and dominance in video, they might unlock a whole new set of use cases and incremental revenue opportunities by promoting a true platform offering around video collaboration.
Benefits. Beyond incremental revenue, Zoom would likely benefit from the other intangible aspects of moving to a platform offering.
- Opening up platform functionality further would help address concerns around security and information sharing. Developers and security experts could scour the APIs and open source code for bugs, security flaws or potential privacy issues and report them back to Zoom.
- Zoom could also examine the activities of the developers, as an input to future product offerings or extensions to the video conferencing solution. This might lead to new solutions they could monetize, like in gaming or media production.
- Video conferencing solutions have low switching costs. While Zoom has the leading solution now due to feature set and performance, that might not be maintainable over time. Having internal developers customize their enterprise’s video conferencing tools would lead to higher lock-in.
Effort. Zoom has extensive developer documentation, if you know where to look. It took me a while to locate all the developer resources. Documentation covers the APIs, SDKs and the basics of building an app. SDKs are open sourced and available in Github. They have a dedicated developer blog on Medium, with some activity. I counted 10 posts so far this year. Developers can get help on a forum, which is pretty active. Developer outreach is very limited at this point. I am not aware of developer meet-ups or Zoom sponsored conferences targeted at the developer community. Interestingly, I did find job postings for a couple of Developer Advocate roles, so this initiative may be in the works.
Me here: I sometime think the run up on Zm share price is high. And then I go back over my notes and remember that in just every imaginable way how efficient a company they are. Wow.
J
11 Likes