Interaction - Anand Bala, Commercial and SMB Sales Leader, India & SAARC, Zoom Video Communications

1.  Can you elaborate on Zoom's innovative portfolio tailored to empower businesses of all sizes, particularly focusing on SMEs?

Zoom's innovative portfolio is designed to empower businesses of all sizes, including SMEs to navigate the complex demands of today's market, with solutions tailored to help these businesses flourish. Today, our platform encompasses Team Chat, Zoom Mail/Calendar, and Zoom Phone, our feature-rich cloud phone system, among other innovations.

Zoom Phone, now available in beta in India, is set to launch in the coming months. By taking advantage of Zoom Phone's flexibility, small businesses can divide and conquer customer inquiries by setting up call queues to route calls and make and receive calls on a mobile phone, a laptop, a tablet, or any other company device connected to the internet.  They can also easily grow their VoIP network over time as the small business grows. This scalability, coupled with Zoom's reliability and geographic redundancy, supports business expansion seamlessly.

Further enhancing collaboration within SMEs, Zoom Team Chat offers an instant messaging solution that helps facilitate the quick sharing of crucial information across the business. This persistent chat solution enables teams to streamline workflows by uploading, sharing, accessing, and managing files directly within the platform. This integration not only helps save time but can also help simplify processes, making it a valuable tool for SMEs looking to do more with less.

Zoom Mail & Calendar,  accessible within the same application as Team Chat, Phone, Meetings, and more, allows businesses to bring all their important collaboration and scheduling together in one place, reducing the need to switch between different apps,  thereby helping to save time and enhance focus.

As the work environment continues to shift towards flexible models, SMEs are in constant search of ways to boost productivity, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Zoom aims to address this need by providing an all-in-one intelligent platform that helps reduce the "toggle tax" and brings together customer and employee experiences. By leveraging Zoom, small businesses can unlock new efficiencies, reach new audiences, automate processes, and stand out in today's crowded market, all while embracing new ways of working and uniting the customer and employee experience with one platform.

2.  How does Zoom contribute to reimagining customer experience and enhancing employee engagement within the business landscape?

Zoom is enabling seamless workflows and empowering modern collaboration with innovations. Our commitment to empowering limitless human connection is demonstrated in the latest innovations showcased at Zoomtopia 2023.

Customers are getting on Zoom Team Chat, driven by increased adoption of Zoom One and new features like Continuous Meeting Chat, which converts transient in-meeting chats to a persistent Zoom Team Chat.  The acquisition of Workvivo, an employee engagement and communications solution that helps strengthen company culture by creating new ways to help keep everyone connected, further solidified our focus on enabling modern work and powering the hybrid workplace. Besides Zoom Contact Center, we’ve made investments in our customer experience (CX) offerings with the rapid pace of innovations like Workforce Management, Quality Management, Zoom Virtual Agent, and AI Expert Assist.   

Zoom is helping customers in India reimagine employee experience and their CX roadmaps across various verticals including government, healthcare, education, and financial services. Zoom's all-in-one intelligent collaboration platform with advanced new capabilities has been transformative, especially for leading organizations in the Indian market, including Glenmark Pharmaceuticals and Razorpay.

3.   Could you provide an overview of Zoom's AI integrations and share insights into the company's future roadmap concerning AI-driven functionalities?

Zoom has long built AI solutions into our products to help customers maximize productivity. Many of our existing products include AI as a core part of our audio/video meeting experiences, room solutions, and customer engagement offerings. A Morning Consult survey commissioned by Zoom in August 2023 revealed that 73% of leaders see teams using AI as advantageous, and 71% believe companies should incorporate AI promptly for a competitive edge.

Zoom is transcending the hype in generative AI by delivering tangible and monetizable products and has a strong roadmap for further innovation underpinned by a commitment to responsible AI.  New capabilities, like automated meeting summaries, reflect our increased investment in AI to support businesses in diverse workplace scenarios. Zoom Revenue Accelerator already offers AI features like meeting summaries, sentiment analysis, and more. We're expanding these functionalities and adding new AI features to help empower revenue teams, enhance customer experience, and improve performance. AI enhancements for Zoom Events, including AI-assisted composition of lobby chats and email invitations, are now generally available, with AI-assisted composition of sessions planned for later this year.

Our commitment is to deliver AI-enabled capabilities at Zoom speed, enabling customers to get the most out of Zoom’s AI innovations and benefit from differentiated value in everyday workflows. The rapid adoption of Zoom AI Companion and AI-enabled features highlights the positive response from our customers. As we continue to invest in AI, Zoom remains committed to ethical and responsible AI development. Our AI approach puts user security and trust at the center of what we do, and we remain committed to building products with equity, privacy, and reliability in mind.

4.  What role do Zoom's Software Development Toolkits (SDKs), Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and the Zoom Developer Platform play in facilitating the creation of apps and integrations for businesses?

Zoom's Software Development Kits (SDKs), Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and the Zoom Developer Platform play a crucial role in enabling developers to create tailored apps and integrations for businesses by providing a comprehensive suite of tools and functionalities for seamless video and audio integration. These developer solutions empower developers to reimagine and enhance their app or platform's user experience through the integration of Zoom's core technology, thereby enabling the development of white-label, video-based applications that maintain unique branding and native user interfaces.

The Video SDK allows developers to create cross-platform video-based apps designed for specific industries and user needs, offering essential tools to build applications that are highly customized. The Meeting SDK helps extend Zoom's simplicity, reliability, and global familiarity to customers across various sectors like education, healthcare, and banking, allowing for the embedding of Zoom Meetings and Webinar experiences directly into developers' applications, platforms, or services.

Furthermore, through the extensive suite of APIs and Zoom Apps, developers have the flexibility to incorporate preferred applications into Zoom Meetings and Webinars and embed either specific components or entire Zoom experiences into their offerings. This not only helps address unique requirements but also enhances user satisfaction and engagement, significantly supporting business expansion.

The flexibility and capabilities offered by the Zoom Developer Platform empower developers to create customized, seamless, and enriching experiences for users across various industries.

5.  Can you share some real-world examples or stories showcasing how SMEs are creatively utilizing the Zoom platform to address their unique challenges and enhance their operations?

Zoom continues to transform organizations across industries and geographies by empowering employees, teams, and customers to work better together and get more done. The demand for seamless, personalized interactions has enabled Zoom's growth, creating connected workflows that help drive satisfaction for both customers and employees.

Zoom's Video and Meeting SDK empowers developers with essential tools, enabling them to create cross-platform video-based apps tailored to specific industries Customer expectations and user requirements are also evolving. Skylark Drones recently integrated Zoom Video SDK with their Drone Software Platform, Drone Mission Ops, bringing forth a new level of connectivity between the skies and the screen. AccioJobs, an ed-tech startup, is ​revolutionizing the way engineering students learn and upskill by integrating Zoom’s Meeting SDK and Video SDK into their product.

Olive Living, a next-gen living community in India, found the perfect solution with Zoom Rooms Virtual Receptionist, which is being leveraged at some of their properties to greet guests upon arrival, provide seamless check-in, and receive feedback on their virtual receptionist experience. Zoom helped Shyft, a personalized wellness provider, scale 10x by encouraging global users to adopt a healthier lifestyle. The company is rolling out its platform with the integration of Zoom Meetings SDK to enable seamless collaboration while bringing people together for live interactions.

6.  How does Zoom envision collaborating with startups and developers through its developer platform to foster innovation and drive digital transformation in the business ecosystem?

India’s digital transformation journey has been nothing short of remarkable. Coupled with the mainstreaming of hybrid work, the country’s embrace of technology has ignited a spark of innovation that is changing the way we connect, communicate, and collaborate. Balancing the future involves navigating the AI revolution, as well as harnessing the power of collaboration, and exploring a platform approach.

By offering its comprehensive suite of SDKs and APIs, and the Zoom Developer Platform, Zoom aims to empower developers and startups to create customized applications and integrations that address the unique challenges and opportunities within the collaboration space and support the growing enterprise and SMB segments across multiple industries, including banking, healthcare, education, as well as government and citizen services. 

In an ever-changing work landscape, effective collaboration and communication tools remain important. We recognize that business leaders in India encounter fresh challenges daily, such as managing hybrid work models, enhancing engagement among customers and employees, harnessing generative AI for empowerment, and simplifying IT solutions. Customer expectations are also evolving, and Zoom seeks to enable startups and developers to build solutions that are not only innovative but also deeply integrated with Zoom's reliable, scalable, and easy-to-use video and audio technology. With teams more dispersed than ever, creating connected workflows is important for businesses to deliver satisfaction to both customers and agents.

Zoom aims to equip businesses of all sizes with the tools they need to succeed in the era of modern work by driving impact with intelligence, making teamwork more meaningful and engaging, and elevating experiences and relationships with customers. By fostering a collaborative ecosystem with startups and developers, Zoom is not just contributing to the digital transformation journey of businesses but also supporting the broader innovation landscape, ultimately helping to facilitate a more connected, collaborative, and personalized future of work and customer engagement.