Zoom has released a host of updates across Meetings, Chat, Rooms, Events, Phone and Contact Center.
Standout updates include new Avatars available in Meetings and Webinars, while the recently launched Contact Center also sees some upgrades.
We’ve rounded up the best of the news here.
Zoom Meetings
The standout new feature in Zoom Meetings is the introduction of Avatars, which let users swap out their appearance for virtual animals that can mimic head movement and expression.
Elsewhere, a move to make the sharing of content easier means that hosts can now stream meetings and webinars directly to Twitch, without needing to manually configure a stream. Account owners and administrators can enable this feature.
A final update to meetings focuses on audio. Hosts can now share computer audio in breakout rooms, further enhancing the experience for participants.
Zoom Contact Center
In Zoom Contact Center, supervisors can now view details of outbound calls made by agents from their assigned queues in the engagement log.
Supervisors also have the ability to listen in, ‘whisper’ to an agent, enter a call or take over a call.
“Cultivating greater engagement is critical to providing an exceptional customer experience,” Kristin Bosch, Product Manager at Zoom, said.
Zoom has also improved the ability for account owners and admins to search for skills in the contact centre.
Users can now:
- Sort skill categories by display name and modified date
- Filter skill categories by type (text or proficiency-based skills)
- Add descriptions to skill categories
- View additional columns in the skill category list including assigned routing profile and associated skills
- Search for a specific category or skill using the search bar
Zoom Chat
Asynchronous communication has come to prominence over the past 18 months, as workers battle with the symptoms of video conferencing fatigue.
To help combat this, Zoom has now added a video messaging feature into Zoom chat. This lets users record videos in non-meeting settings and send them to colleagues who can then view them outside of a live meeting environment.
Chat has also been enhanced to deliver a more customisable experience to users.
Chats and channels can now be customised in the left sidebar and put into up to 200 folders. Chats and channels within these folders can also be organised.
Zoom Events
Joining internal events has been made easier, with attendees now able to join with a single click and bypass the typical event registration flow. This feature is available to all customers hosting internal events.
Staying with registration, hosts can now collect attendee details more easily in registration. Making it quicker to get attendee agreement for marketing and privacy policies. Hosts will also be able to add up to three privacy policies.
In Zoom Expo, event organisers can enable and disable Expo from the control panel, helping hosts to direct attendees during virtual events and shift attention to sessions.
New analytics also mean that hosts see which booths attendees have interacted with and for how long, as well as whether they’ve spent time in the event lobby.
Zoom Rooms
Zoom’s Workspace Reservation systems will now provide a suggestion for users when they make a booking.
Admins are also now able to view metrics about how the Workspace Reservation feature is used. A new dashboard will show information such as workspace usage, check-in rates, and most-used workspace. This information can be used to compare different floors and locations within a business’ office footprint.
Zoom Phone
Zoom Phone has seen tremendous growth since launching and smashed the two million seats barrier in September last year.
The latest enhancements to the voice platform mean that users can forward voicemails to other users linked to the same account. They can also mark voicemails as private, meaning they cannot be sent on again.
Continuing the Asynchronous theme discussed in the Chat section above, users can now quickly send audio messages without waiting for a call to connect. They can do this by pressing the intercom button next to a contact in the Zoom Phone tab.
Zoom has also introduced three useful features for administrators.
Admins can now manage policies at account, group, site and user level to more easily customise policies.
International calls can now be managed more efficiently by letting admins control which individual countries a user can call – having previously only been able to toggle international calling on and off.
Admins can also stay on top of the features that are available across an organisation with a new user feature entitlement report.
