Zoom through your video calls! (but only if you do LOTS of video calls)
March 12, 2019
Zoom through your video calls! (but only if you do LOTS of video calls)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Business
Overall Satisfaction with Zoom
We use Zoom for two main purposes: 1) to connect with sales leads, and 2) to hold meetings with clients. About 75% of our use of Zoom is our sales representatives (including Sales Development Representatives and Business Developers) connecting with leads and holding qualification appointments. The other 25% of our use is our client teams (including project managers, account managers, and production leads) holding client meetings and workshops.
We’ve found that in-person meetings are best for building relationships with sales leads and clients, but about 60% of our leads and clients are from out of state, so in-person meetings are not possible. Zoom is the tool we use to solve this problem – although it’s more challenging to build rapport and connect over a video call, the efficiency and access to out-of-state markets and clients is more than worth it.
The other business problem that Zoom solves for us is training. We record almost every sales and client meeting, and use the recorded sessions to train new Sales Development Representatives, Business Developers, Project Managers, Account Managers, and Production Leads.
- I’ve tried many different video call products (Google Hangouts, appear.in, Uber Conference), and Zoom has been significantly higher-quality and more reliable. I very rarely have a call drop or have trouble with hearing people on Zoom calls.
- Zoom has recently released a Chrome extension, which is a super convenient way to quickly start and schedule meetings. I enjoyed appear.in for this reason, but the quality was too low. This is valuable for me as a project manager - I am able to quickly schedule Zoom meetings without leaving my current workflow (i.e. I can stay in Google Drive, Hubspot, Google Calendar, Gmail, or wherever else I am working and easily schedule a Zoom call).
- Zoom’s “breakout room” feature is hugely valuable for the interactive client workshops we run. You can easily split multiple users into separate breakout rooms, then easily re-combine all participants back together in real time. I use this feature to facilitate design thinking workshops.
- I use Zoom’s “copy the invitation” feature many times a day – I have very rarely had people I’m connecting with have any trouble joining the call, because the invitation has all of the information they need to easily connect, regardless of whether they are connecting by computer or by phone.
- Zoom has a LOT of functionality that I’ve never used (Polling, Whiteboard, Remote Control, et cetera). These features are buried within the “Settings” screens in Zoom. I think they could do a better job of suggesting features to users – perhaps giving little pop-ups or some kind of onboarding guide to show additional functionality of Zoom.
- I don’t like that you have to download the Zoom app on your computer to use it. It is a fairly clunky user experience compared with some of the other solutions on the market (e.g. appear.in allows you to create and join a meeting right from the URL bar).
- I wish Zoom had more integration capabilities. I have started using the integration with Google Calendar and really like it. I would like more options to integrate the Zoom calls – especially 1) an automatic “save to Google Drive” (rather than just to Zoom or just to my computer), and 2) integrations with transcription services (e.g. Otter.ai) to easily create transcriptions from meetings.
- More deals closed outside of our state. We are much more easily able to close deals outside of our state, because sales appointments and presentations are easy and powerful through Zoom, and we’ve increased our business outside of our state from ~30% to 60%. This makes our followup with leads we meet at conferences much more personal and effective.
- Improved client collaboration and client experience. It has become much easier to share the content of a meeting with someone who misses the meeting. Our clients love that they can go back to the meeting recording and review particular parts of our workshops.
- Higher employee satisfaction and connection. Our internal team can much more easily work from home and not miss important meetings. For example, we don’t require our team members to come into the office on Fridays, and we are still able to hold multiple internal meetings with them while they are in the comfort of their home.
I have not used the Zoom Rooms functionality. My feedback from an outside perspective is that I can't even tell why it is different than just starting a "Personal Meeting Room" meeting or a "Scheduled Meeting". Zoom describes the benefits but doesn't explain why I should use it. I'm getting most of what I want out of the existing functionality of Zoom calls, so unless they can more clearly describe how it is different, I'm not going to use it/pay for it/spend more time trying to understand what it is.
Zoom seems to be significantly higher-quality and more reliable than these other products. I very rarely have a call drop or have trouble with hearing people on Zoom calls.
appear.in was my favorite in terms of ease of setting up a meeting. I used it much more when our company had a team Slack portal. You didn’t have to navigate to an app just to schedule a meeting, you could just type in appear.in/companyname into the URL bar to start a meeting. There are a few more steps to starting a meeting with Zoom.
Zoom is much better for companies and teams that do lots of video calls. I never figured out how to do a recording with other products.
Zoom is a bit more feature-heavy than Hangouts or Uber Conference. It is a little bit harder to get used to, but once you know how to use it, there are much more options for customizing your video call workflow and functionality. The complexity is worth the value we get out of it.
If you are a single user, or rarely do video calls (less than 2 a week), I would probably use a simpler, free solution.