Opportunity in the ANZ market for UCaaS with Zoom and Tradewinds

Building a Resilient Workforce with UCaaS and Effective Partner Support

Around the world, work has taken on a new meaning; from a place we go, into a thing that we do. It’s clear that while offices no longer lie empty, employees are still demanding the flexibility of the hybrid workplace. This change in our work life seems set to stay with communication and collaboration increasingly moving online through the use of technologies like Zoom’s platform. Organisations looking to have a positive impact on both employee productivity and satisfaction should focus on the tools and support they offer and improve day-to-day experiences.

Partner growth is a cornerstone to Zoom’s success by providing a broader channel to ensure these powerful and flexible tools are accessible to a wider audience. Last November, Zoom announced the added benefits for its Zoom Up Partner Program that gathered momentum and contributed to 30% of non-online bookings globally, up 50% over the previous 12 months. The Zoom Up Partner Program is designed to engage and reward qualified Zoom Partners and simplify the sales cycle based on their business models and how they engage with customers to deliver Zoom’s video-first unified communications as a service to customers.

To further improve the partner support in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), Zoom is collaborating with Tradewinds as an authorised Technology Services Distributor (TSD), helping partners of all sizes go-to-market with Zoom’s products. Headlining the Tradewinds relationship is the Zoom Up Referral Program, designed to reward qualified leads generated by Zoom Authorised Agents.

The success of the partner programs was evident with high praises from current partners of Tradewinds and Zoom. Dan Baker, Managing Director of Evictus shared, “We have been dealing with both Tradewinds and Zoom as an Agent for many years now, we knew the technology was fantastic and considered best of breed. The most impressive part of our partnership comes from the support both organisations provide us. It is second to none. We have worked across some large vendors over the years and getting support can be difficult and sometimes with no ownership, it can be like a tick in the box. It is a very different story engaging with Tradewinds and Zoom, as they get the right people onto the task and with great enthusiasm. It has certainly helped my business scale and I am looking forward to the continued partnership.”

From the frontlines, Lachlan, Solutions Consultant at Cloud Applications , says of the Partner Program, “Our partnership with Tradewinds and Zoom enabled us to grow our business, headcount and create a 10x revenue pipeline in a short timeframe, allowing us to grow and expand our business. We highly recommend utilising all the skills and services available within the partnership model that allows us to unlock more revenue opportunities within your existing customer environments.”

What’s New at Zoom: Zoom One, Zoom Mail and Calendar

In order to ensure that the changing communication needs are met, Zoom continuously innovates to offer the most relevant solutions to the UC market. Zoom introduced Zoom One: an all-in-one, single licence, communications and collaboration offering.

Supporting everything the hybrid worker needs in the modern workspace, with communications and collaboration that’s at the heart of Zoom One, which puts persistent chat, phone, video calls, meetings and whiteboarding into a single platform. Zoom One has features like Workspace Reservation – users can reserve any type of space from anywhere, and in moving between workspaces, they can switch devices with one click to take phone calls and video meetings with them.

The integration of capabilities across the product lets employees escalate chat messages seamlessly to phone calls or video meetings; launching whiteboard collaborations from their desktop or room that they can easily share with others; or check co-workers’ presence status.

Along with combining communications and collaboration under a single platform, Zoom One also brings everything together under a single licence.

Pro, Business, Business Plus and Enterprise licences add features like integrated cloud storage, longer and larger meetings, unlimited whiteboarding, Zoom Phone and other extras.

Zoom Mail and Calendar

The Zoom Mail and Calendar released as a beta last November is a clear representation of the mindsets behind the development of its solutions; to ensure users the best experience. There’s a simple rationale for keeping everything the user needs in one place: it gets rid of the need to toggle between applications.

According to an article from the Harvard Business Review, the thousands of times users alt-tab each day impose a “toggle tax” on their efficiency. Even a couple of seconds reorienting to different interfaces each time ends up sapping four hours each week, or five weeks a year, of the user’s attention.

If users can have emails, video meetings, chat messages and phone calls, collaborations and whiteboard sharing without leaving the Zoom app, they can avoid time wastage from context-switching.

The Zoom Mail Client connects existing third-party email services to the Zoom app, and is available on the user’s desktop at launch. Similarly, the Zoom Calendar Client connects scheduling workflows from popular calendar services to Zoom Meetings, Zoom Phone, and Zoom Chat. It shows who has joined meetings in the Zoom Calendar sidebar, and lets users schedule phone calls or meetings in the calendar.

Enhancing Customer Experience with Zoom Contact Center and Virtual Agent

Alongside the expanded platform suite, in January this year, ANZ heralded the release of the Zoom Contact Center in the Asia Pacific Region. With the release of Zoom Contact Center, the Customer Experience (CX) offerings in ANZ are up for a transformative experience and bound to set new standards for the CCaaS (contact centre as a service) market and, more broadly, the entire CX industry.

The Zoom Contact Center is an omnichannel engagement platform with video natively built and utilised in the powerful yet simple tool we’ve come to know. This intuitive experience combined with a seamless and unified screen-share, voice, and webchat technology, means customers are better equipped for empathetic connections and collaborations – providing an innovative solution to the timeworn challenge of personalising CX. Zoom Contact Center and Virtual Agent are built on the same Zoom platform that handles the company’s award-winning unified communications tools, complete with amazing quality, reliability, and the ability to scale forto businesses of all sizes across any industry.  

Zoom Virtual Agent

While Zoom Contact Center provides businesses with a way to keep their agents working at their best from any location, there are many cases where customers prefer not to interact with an agent at all (or none is available).. That’s why Zoom introduced the Zoom Virtual Agent: a conversational AI and chatbot solution that delivers fast, accurate web and mobile support experiences.  With proprietary conversational AI and machine learning technology, Zoom Virtual Agent can interpret the everyday language that customers are most comfortable using and provide immediate help or, if needed, intelligently route the customer to the right agent for help. Instead of having to spend countless hours building and maintaining a “rules-based” chatbot, Zoom Virtual Agent customers use our AI capabilities to quickly and easily scale up their self-servicing, keeping agent call volumes and handle times low, while delivering the best possible user experience.

The Zoom Virtual Agent has seamless integration with a variety of contact centre solutions – including, of course, the Zoom Contact Center.

Benefiting from the Zoom & Tradewinds Collaboration

Levering their long standing global relationship, Zoom and Tradewinds offer to bring Zoom’s entire platform of offerings to better serve the customer and partner base in ANZ. With expanded product offerings such as Zoom One, the Zoom Contact Center, Virtual Agent and more, the opportunities, relevance and adaptabilities are limitless. The collaboration provides an ideal opportunity to appreciate the magnitude of the UCaas market in the region as customers continue to seek innovative solutions to empower their everyday life.

In short, the Zoom Up Partner program is designed to simplify the partner sales cycle whilst providing all the necessary tools a partner may need in their sales and marketing journey. This entails partner use and demo licences, access to the Partner Learning Center for training and accreditations via the Zoom Up Partner Portal. Providing role-based accreditations designed to train and validate partners’ knowledge and skills in Sales, Technical Sales, and Post-Sales Technical, with appropriate technical requirements at each level.

Last but not least, there’s the Zoom Partner Demand Centre, launched in 2021 and better known as Zoom’s marketing automation platform with its own personalised concierge consultation service. Serving to enable and support partners in their Zoom marketing journey by providing high quality, co-brandable campaigns and assets. Zoom’s Partner Portal serves as a main hub hosting all the above mentioned resources and ensures Partners are kept up to date with the latest information.

Leveraging the Zoom Platform to Boost Your Business

To ensure that nothing goes amiss and that customers and partners alike have an optimal experience and fully enjoy the power of the Zoom platform, Zoom Partners have access to a hosted virtual experience tour of Zoom’s Executive Briefing Center (EBC) live from Zoom’s Experience Centres in the region. The personalised 60 minutes virtual tour is hosted via the Zoom Webinar platform, and guided by a dedicated EBC specialist who is there to provide an onboarding session of all Zoom products in a full scale. Questions are answered real-time, detailed know-hows are shared constantly as the live demo tour guides participants through - if you’re interested in leveraging this for your customers, please enrol as a Zoom Partner with Tradewinds.