Zoomtopia 2023: New offerings that help you do your best work yet

Work is a big part of our lives — many of us spend half of our waking hours at our jobs. That means we need to work on things that we find important and meaningful.

Purposeful work isn’t exclusive to what we work on, it’s also associated with how we work. Motivation and productivity are equally tied to both, necessitating strategic solutions that can help you reimagine your workday your way — whether that means better collaboration with colleagues or more effective communication with customers.

Deploying the right solutions is extra important in the era of hybrid work, when it’s harder to build the level of connection and engagement that fosters productivity. As many of us navigate a return to the office, technology that supports inclusivity, equity, and meaningful collaboration is the linchpin not only of a successful hybrid work strategy but also of helping us find the sense of purpose we’re all seeking.

At Zoomtopia, we announced new solutions, innovative features, and platform expansions that can help you streamline and simplify how you work with colleagues and customers alike.

Making teamwork more meaningful

The Zoom platform is designed to enable seamless team collaboration throughout your workday, whether you’re connecting over the phone, chat, or a meeting.

In meetings, someone is almost always presenting a document for review, or sharing it over chat for input later. That’s why we’re excited to announce Zoom Docs, our AI-powered, modular workspace for docs, wikis, and work management, all in the Zoom platform. Coming in 2024, it will integrate with Zoom and third-party apps to help you easily create, collaborate, manage projects, and stay organised.

Zoom Docs takes collaboration to the next level by providing the ability to tailor your workspace to the needs of your projects and audiences. You can customise the layout with drag-and-drop content blocks for text, tables, images, and more, and easily find information with folders and wiki pages. Plus, with AI built in, Zoom Docs allows you to populate docs with content from Zoom Meetings to inform and jumpstart creation, and Zoom AI Companion will help summarise and create information.

Zoom Docs joins our growing list of new solutions and features designed to help bring teams together in a unified, seamless way. These recent and upcoming enhancements are all designed to help increase employee engagement, support hybrid work, or improve productivity.

Driving impact through intelligence

From unsurpassed sound quality to noise cancellation and auto-adjusted in-meeting lighting, AI has been a part of Zoom’s DNA for years. It’s an essential part of our future, too, paving the path forward for our platform as we continue to roll out generative AI capabilities designed to help simplify the way you work.

We recently announced Zoom AI Companion, available at no additional cost with the paid services in your eligible Zoom user account,* and have been introducing new capabilities at a rapid pace. The latest capabilities and offerings now include:

• The ability to generate ideas on a digital whiteboard and organise them into categories, helping teams get to work faster.
• Expanded access to Zoom AI Companion for certain education and healthcare customers

And there’s more on deck. A few more capabilities from AI Companion that you can look forward to in the coming months are:

• Chat compose for Zoom Events, where event managers will get help from generative AI through AI-composed event email invitations and lobby chats (available in the coming months), and sessions (available next year).
• Automatically detect meeting intent in Zoom Team Chat messages and display a scheduling button to help streamline the scheduling process.
• Respond to messages quickly with suggestions to help complete sentences and responses.
• Break down complex conversations and recommend a smart reply for users to help the conversation flow.
• You can find the full list of new and upcoming Zoom AI Companion features here.

*Available for customers with the paid services assigned to their Zoom user accounts. Zoom AI Companion may not be available for all regions and industry verticals.

Enabling flexible collaboration on a modern platform 

Employee engagement

• Workvivo: Workvivo, acquired by Zoom earlier this year, is an employee engagement and communications solution that helps strengthen company culture by creating new ways to keep everyone connected. Having a strong ongoing employee engagement strategy is crucial in today’s working environments, and soon you’ll be able to access Workvivo from within the Zoom platform.

Hybrid work

• Zoom Rooms features for better hybrid meetings: When you have a bunch of people in a Zoom Room, it can be hard for remote attendees to identify people by name, and meeting transcripts only list the name of the Zoom Room, no matter who’s speaking. Our name tags feature will allow those in the meeting room to have their name displayed along with their video. Name tags are expected to be available in 2024.
• Workspace Reservation wayfinding feature: While Workspace Reservation has been available since 2022, we’re continuously optimising it to support the modern hybrid office experience. Our wayfinding feature, coming in 2024, will provide a map showing a route to the seat that you reserved, making it easier to find your spot for the day.
• Huddles for hybrid employees: Want to recreate the water cooler effect for a hybrid workforce? That’s where Huddles comes into play. As a virtual co-working space, Huddles can be used to get to know your co-workers better or to get an answer to a question quickly. With its latest feature, “my office view,” you’ll be able to know when colleagues are in a virtual huddle or in the physical office along with their presence and location. “My office view” in Huddles is scheduled to be available in 2024.

Productivity

• More effective meetings: There’s only so much time in the day, so making sure you’re getting the most out of meetings is critical. We’re enhancing the meetings experience with a revamped Meetings tab in the Zoom app, new note-taking capabilities with Zoom Notes, and improvements to our continuous meeting chat, bringing more of what you need together in one place to help you stay productive and easily track your to-dos before, during, and after meetings.
• Zoom Clips: With our new asynchronous video offering, you can easily record, edit, and share high-quality short-form videos both internally and externally. Zoom Clips, generally available in the coming months, helps enable clear communication, cut back on wasted time, and accommodate collaboration across time zones.
• Zoom Scheduler: As our appointment scheduling tool, Zoom Scheduler (now generally available) is designed to reduce the time and hassle of appointment scheduling with people outside your organization through seamless integration with the Zoom platform, making it easier to meet, collaborate, and make the most of your time. Zoom Scheduler has new capabilities coming soon, including:
  - The ability to incorporate unique schedules of availability per host so teams do not have to block calendars for different teams or regions.
  - The ability to delegate support so that executive assistants or other support members can book for others.
  - A Salesforce integration, helping you seamlessly link meeting records from Zoom Scheduler in Salesforce automatically.

Strengthening customer relationships

Customers’ needs are ever-evolving, so our solutions — like Zoom Contact Centre — are built to keep pace and elevate the way agents work. Zoom Virtual Agent (ZVA) joined the ranks earlier this year to deliver web and mobile support for both customers and agents during high-traffic times, and now both are continuing to evolve to help elevate the customer experience.

A few exciting enhancements coming soon to Zoom Contact Centre and Zoom Virtual Agent include:

• Generative AI in ZVA, which empowers teams to build workflows and train bots faster and easier than ever before.
• AI Expert Assist, which serves up useful knowledge-base articles and helpful insights during live engagements to help agents resolve customer issues efficiently and effectively. And it isn’t just about agents, AI Expert Assist also helps make supervisors productive by generating summaries and automatically notifying them of the most important engagements that need their attention.
• Outbound dialer, remote desktop control, PII redaction, and Customer Managed Key for Zoom Contact Centre.
• Integrations with two popular Meta digital apps, WhatsApp and Messenger,** so agents can better meet customers where they are. 

Further expanding our customer experience offerings, Zoom Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) equips your contact centre with the right number of agents at the right times to help meet customer demands. WEM includes Zoom Quality Management, an AI-powered customer experience (CX) tool that analyses customer interactions via various communication channels to unlock key business insights and offer personalised coaching to agents.

Enabling seamless workflows

No matter if you’re communicating with co-workers or customers, the ability to choose your communication channel, application, or device goes a long way. Choice underpins the entire Zoom platform, which is an open ecosystem designed to give you access to whatever you need to do your best work.

Whether you’re deploying a Zoom App or one of the countless integrations on the Zoom App Marketplace, integrating essential functionalities right into your existing workflows helps you save time and increase productivity. A few new ways we’re helping you embrace an open ecosystem to streamline how you work:

• The expanding Zoom App Marketplace: Our marketplace continues to grow, and now has more than 2,500 pre-built apps and integrations for customers to discover and use.
  App marketplace
• Additional solutions with access to apps: You also now have the ability to run third-party applications within Zoom Contact Centre. And in the coming months, you’ll be able to run Zoom Apps in Zoom Phone, Zoom Whiteboard, and Zoom Mail and Calendar.
• Admin authorised apps for users: Admins can curate a selected list of apps from the Zoom App Marketplace and have them ready to use from the moment a user signs into Zoom. By eliminating extra steps, admin authorized apps make it easier than ever to bring your preferred apps and existing workflows right into Zoom.

Make your workday work better for you

At work, the little things add up, requiring a lot of time and energy — the time it takes to jump to your separate docs application when you’re on a call, compose a thoughtful chat, or figure out the missing ingredient in your customer experience strategy. By trimming unnecessary or overly complex tasks, you don’t just regain productivity, you also pave the way for more strategic work.

Whether you’re bringing your docs into your communications platform, cutting out the mundane with intuitive AI features, or simplifying workflows with integrations, the Zoom platform is your one-stop shop for productive, meaningful work. With Zoom, you can spend more of those 40-plus work hours building meaningful outcomes, better relationships, and stronger connections.

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Source: Originally posted on Zoom blog.