Eric Yuan, founder and chief executive officer of Zoom Video Communications Inc., center, responds as he rings the bell during the company’s initial public offering on the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, USA, on April 18, 2019. Zoom reported net profit of $ 7.6 million on revenues of $ 331 million for the year ended January, and is now worth nine times the $ 1 billion value it achieved after a round of funding two years ago.
Victor J. Blue | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Zoom on Tuesday said it has figured out a way to allow people who visit offices to check in with a receptionist without physical contact. It’s about starting a Zoom call, of course.
The development shows that Zoom recognizes that it must ensure that its products remain valuable after people return to the office, after months of working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The new feature, Kiosk Mode, is part of Zoom Rooms, one of the company’s business offerings. Unlike the standard Zoom video calling service, which people use on their own PCs and mobile devices, Zoom Rooms is for meeting places like conference rooms and starts at $ 499 per year per room.
Here’s how the system works: As soon as an office visitor enters a lobby, she goes to the touchscreen monitor with a camera and speaker and taps a button to initiate a conversation with a receptionist. The visitor talks to the receptionist via Zoom and the receptionist can let the visitor enter the office space, for example by unlocking a door remotely.
“The receptionist does not have to be present,” Harry Moseley, Zoom’s chief information officer, said Monday in an interview with CNBC. “They can be in their own home. They can be anywhere. In fact, they can be in a different country and they can support multiple buildings.”
Kiosk Mode can also help businesses reduce the number of receptionists on each floor of their buildings, Moseley said.
The pandemic has shown that workers can be effective while working remotely, and Mosely expects companies to embrace a mix of remote and personal work, even after the pandemic ends. That scenario would benefit Zoom, which is a popular means of meeting colleagues virtually, as well as rivals like Cisco, Google and Microsoft.
But analysts expect Zoom’s growth to slow due to the hypergrowth it saw during the early days of the pandemic. For the quarter ended Jan. 31, Refinitiv analysts forecast revenue growth of 331% year-over-year. For the April quarter, they argue for 153% growth and for the year ending January 2022, they expect only 38% growth.
So Zoom continues to build. In addition to Kiosk mode, it comes with a way for employees to connect their Android and iOS devices to Zoom Rooms, so that employees don’t have to touch a common device in a conference room. Zoom is also adding Amazon’s Alexa for Business service to Zoom Rooms, so joining a call is as easy as saying, “Alexa, join my meeting.”
It’s possible Zoom could add support for other voice assistants, Moseley said.
“This is the first iteration, if you will, of a lot of these things,” he said.
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