Zoom has captured the headlines around the world during this coronavirus pandemic. We have all heard about it because of its adoption among consumers and high-profile news stories of people running parties online – as well as unsavory ones related to security, which we will discuss later. But it also has seen massive take up among businesses as they seek to overcome the communication and collaboration issues from working from home. With homeworking set to continue for a long period and the value of software such as Zoom clearly demonstrated, all businesses should be starting to look longer term, assess the alternatives to Zoom and evaluate whether it is right for their business or whether there is something better suited to your business’ needs.
Your Business Probably Needs More Than Video Conferencing
The starting point to evaluate if Zoom is the best solution for your business should be to get together a list of all the things you need your business and your workforce to do remotely. What are you trying to achieve? The focus and massive take up for Zoom has been around video conferencing for meetings, but as a business you need to be able to do so much more. Your business needs to collaborate, it needs to communicate externally, it needs to be able to do customer service whether telephone based or on another channel, it needs to manage projects and it needs to follow potential leads, among others. In other words, you need telephony, CRM, multi-channel contact centre, internal collaboration, task and project management functionality.
When you are making this list don’t just focus on immediate things but think to the future and include those solutions that you haven’t implemented yet but have been thinking about getting now for a long time. Why? Your business has been hit badly by the downturn and your employees can no longer do things the old-fashioned way and walk over to each other’s desks to resolve a confusion or get advice. It is time to try everything to become as productive as possible. For example, inexpensive live chat for your website can help you maximise opportunities from website visitors and enable you to do customer service more efficiently.
In addition, if you already have some or all these solutions, don’t assume you are covered, but understand if that solution is presently on-premise or in the cloud. If it is on-premise, firstly, understand if it has been possible to make it available remotely. Then evaluate the time and cost it took to make that legacy solution work from your employees’ homes and the impact on their productivity. For example, if your employees have to access this solution through a remote desktop find out how it is performing in terms of speed and stability - and then get a demo of some cloud software to see the performance differences. In general, cloud solutions will be much faster, more secure and provide easier access through the browser. If it is impossible or the cost or performance trade-off too much, add this to the list of solutions to need in order to enable your company to function better remotely.
If you did not have any solution in place it means now you need to get it done. Your business is under pressure, and you need to add efficiencies, your workers are not next to each other it is time to make sure your data is not in silos.
Your Business’ Internal Capabilities
Once you have your list of functionality, take a look at your business, your number of staff, how their duties are split and how you are likely to expand over the next few years. If you are a large business, you may need best in class feature sets for each and every item on your list. In which case, you will need the resources and IT professionals to ensure they are integrated and data from across your company doesn’t end up getting siloed. If you are a small business, you may have several employees handling similar tasks and you don’t need to be able to set up sophisticated structures of management within the software. In this case, a generalist application that can do most things well. Equally, importantly, if you are a small business you will not have the resources to integrate different software packages together so it is best to find something that can do everything. Not only do you avoid needing to integrate your employees can be more productive as everything is available inside one UX.
With these steps done take a good look at Zoom and see if it matches up to your needs. If not shop around for a solution that can offer those things.
But I Only Need Video Conferencing
If you only need video conferencing then there are a host of other solutions in the market including Microsoft Teams, Cisco WebEx, GotoMeeting and ClickMeeting. Choosing between them can be difficult but think about how many free licenses you will need and if you will need toll free dial-in numbers. You can read an in-depth comparison here.
Data Security and Privacy
With Zoom’s increased success has come increased scrutiny and heavy criticism for a number of privacy issues: sending user data to Facebook, wrongly claiming the app had end-to-end encryption, allowing meeting hosts to track attendees and flaws which left Mac users vulnerable to having webcams and microphones hijacked. The CEO of Zoom recently apologized for Zoom’s security issues. In the case of sending user data to Facebook some have suggested that also includes content of meetings.
If you are just having a party you may accept the trade-off for a free service, but if you are a business you should have serious reservations around the use of your data and even the chance for your meeting to get hacked.
Hosted Telephony
Zoom offers video conferencing, workspaces, webinars and now hosted telephony. If hosted telephony was part of your list of key functionality, then how does Zoom’s solution measure up? Hosted telephony is an incredibly competitive space with many great solutions in the market, but buying a solution is not just about the PBX, administration and softphone features available, you need to consider how it connects to voice networks as you additional need to pay for these and pricing can vary considerably. Specifically, can you use any network or SIP trunk with the hosted telephony solution? How easy is it to set up? What is the pricing on the voice network being offered? In the case of Zoom, it is possible to use your own voice network and connect your PBX or SIP trunk, but only with a session broader controller. A very complicated process. If you choose to use Zoom’s voice network, you may find that pricing is much more competitive outside.
Bitrix24: An Excellent All-Rounder
Bitrix24 is the ideal solution for companies looking for a great all-in-one solution. It is a complete suite of social collaboration and communication tools in one unified package, featuring telephony, CRM, multi-channel contact centre, internal collaboration, task and project management, and even a website builder. It is trusted by more than 6 million organisations worldwide.
Bitrix24 comes with an open API, so it’s easy to customize and integrate this system with other business solutions that you may be using. Integrations are available for Zapier, Quickbooks, Facebook, Freshbooks, Xero, Dropbox, Box, GSuite, Microsoft Office 365, Asana, Zoho, Pipedrive and almost all other popular SaaS products.
Hostcomm is an official reseller of Bitrix24. Buying Bitrix from Hostcomm means a guarantee of free, unlimited UK-based telephone technical support. We are experts in contact centre services and support with a Trustpilot 5-Star average and more than 15 years’ experience. We have an in-house development team with a track record of delivering on complex projects of all sizes. And we are able to provide exceptional rates on call charges, BT numbers, and a vast array of softphones and handsets.
