Are you getting the full value from Zoom?
5 questions manufacturers should ask
For a lot of businesses, Zoom arrived with a fairly straightforward job to do.
Meetings. Video calls. Keeping people connected.
Then the businesses moved on.
More sites. Different working patterns. New teams. Acquisitions. Changes to the phone system. New meeting rooms. Customer service platforms. Connectivity upgrades. A few bits of technology that were meant to be temporary but somehow became permanent.
And before long, Zoom is no longer sitting in a nice, neat communications environment.For manufacturers, that can be particularly pronounced. Factories, warehouses, offices, field-based teams and customer-facing functions can all have very different communication requirements.So if you're already using Zoom, there is a useful question worth asking:
Are you getting everything you could from the technology you already have?
That doesn't automatically mean buying more of it.
Sometimes the answer is consolidation. Sometimes it's better adoption. Sometimes it's integration. And sometimes the best outcome of reviewing an environment is discovering that what you have is already doing exactly what you need.
Here are five good places to start:
1. How is Zoom actually being used across your business?
This sounds obvious. It often isn't.
Start with the basics: Who uses Zoom? What do they use it for? And is that consistent across your different teams and locations?
A head office may use Zoom very differently from a production facility. One site might have standardised meeting rooms while another has accumulated a mixture of devices and platforms. Some teams may live in Zoom every day while others barely touch it.
That isn't necessarily a problem.
But you can't decide whether you're getting good value from a technology estate until you understand how it's actually being used.
For multi-site manufacturers, it's particularly worth looking for duplication, inconsistencies and technology that has grown up independently at different locations.
2. What is sitting alongside Zoom for telephony?
This is where things can get interesting.
Most organisations use Zoom for meetings while continuing to operate a separate business phone system. Again, that doesn't automatically mean anything is wrong. But it does make it worth asking whether the two environments still make sense.
For example:
- Are you maintaining separate platforms and suppliers?
- Do different sites use different telephony?
- Are there legacy handsets or numbers that nobody is quite sure what to do with?
- Are users switching between systems unnecessarily?
- Is the existing phone environment still meeting the needs of factory, warehouse and office-based employees?
Zoom Phone supports capabilities including multiple sites, call queues, auto receptionists, shared lines and integration with Zoom Rooms. Zoom also now talks specifically about manufacturing use cases such as communication across shifts, warehouses and frontline environments.
The question isn't "Should we replace our phone system with Zoom?" It's: "Is there a good reason we're running things the way we are today?"
If there is, great. If nobody quite knows anymore, that's worth investigating.
3. Are your meeting rooms part of the same strategy?
Meeting rooms are another area where technology tends to accumulate.
One room works brilliantly. Another requires three cables, a particular laptop and someone called Dave who knows which button to press.
Most businesses have encountered some version of it.
For manufacturers with multiple offices and sites, that inconsistency can become a genuine nuisance.
Look at the experience from the user's perspective. Can someone walk into a room and start the meeting easily? Are rooms being used? Is the experience broadly consistent between locations? Are you supporting old equipment that no longer needs to be there?
It's also worth looking at meeting rooms and telephony together rather than treating them as completely separate environments. Zoom, for example, allows Zoom Rooms to be integrated with Zoom Phone, including the ability to make and receive calls from rooms.
You may not need to change anything.But your meeting rooms shouldn't be an island.
4. Could Zoom have a role in your customer communications too?
This is probably one of the areas most easily overlooked.
Ask someone what Zoom does and they'll still probably say video meetings.
But the platform now extends considerably beyond that.Zoom Contact Centre supports customer interactions across channels including voice, video, email, chat, SMS and social messaging. Zoom Phone can also integrate with third-party contact centre platforms.
For a manufacturer, that raises some useful questions:
- How do customers contact you today?
- What about distributors, suppliers, or partners?
- Where do service calls go?
- Are customer-facing teams using completely separate communications technology from the rest of the business?
- And is that separation deliberate, or simply historical?
This isn't an argument for moving everything onto one platform. It's an argument for knowing why you've got what you've got.
5. Is the connectivity underneath it all good enough?
This is the bit that's easy to forget when you're talking about applications.
The cleverest communications platform in the world isn't much use if the infrastructure underneath it isn't reliable. For manufacturers, connectivity can be particularly important because the requirement doesn't stop at head office.
You've potentially got factories, warehouses, depots, remote locations and people moving between them. So, look underneath Zoom too.
Where are your single points of failure?
- What happens if the primary connection to a site goes down?
- Do you have appropriate resilience?
- Are users regularly experiencing call-quality issues?
- Does connectivity performance vary significantly between locations?
- And as you've added more cloud services over time, has the network underneath them evolved as well?
This is where a Zoom review can quickly become a wider conversation about the communications estate, because the experience users have at the top is only as good as the infrastructure supporting it underneath.
So, do you need more Zoom?
Maybe. But that's the wrong place to start.
The better question is: Are we getting the best possible value from the communications technology we already have?
- Look at how Zoom is being used
- Look at what sits alongside it
- Look at telephony
- Look at the meeting rooms
- Look at customer communications
- Look at the connectivity underneath everything
You may find opportunities to consolidate platforms or suppliers. You may find functionality you're paying for elsewhere that you already have access to. You may uncover gaps.
Or you might confirm that your current environment is absolutely right for your business.
All of those are useful answers.
Want to take a closer look at your Zoom estate?
If some of the questions above have made you wonder what might be happening across your own environment, we can help.
Our free 30-minute Zoom Estate Review is a straightforward look at how you're using Zoom today, what sits around it, and whether there are opportunities to simplify things or get more value from what you already have.
No assumption that anything needs replacing. No obligation. Just a useful conversation and a second pair of eyes.
Harry, Dean and Jamie are the team behind the reviews. Drop them an email and they'll do the rest.
