Zoom, the video conferencing service, will pursue a largely common strategy as it seeks to reach both enterprise customers and “prosumers” who use its platform in both a professional and consumer context.
Eric Yuan, Zoom’s CEO, discussed this topic on a conference call with investors, and reported that the company’s number of enterprise customers with over ten employees increased by 354% year on year to 265,000 in the last quarter.
That trend is largely explained by a growing reliance on video conferencing due to widespread lockdowns, the implementation of social distancing, and companies shifting their employees to working from home.
Another outcome of this trend: on a given day, a user could turn to Zoom in a professional capacity, before later logging on and talking to friends and loved ones.
“The boundary between ‘prosumers’ and consumers, or enterprise customers, is not direct and clear anymore,” Yuan said. (For more, read WARC's in-depth report: The Zoom boom: What the video-conferencing brand has learned – and what it’s doing next.)
As Zoom maps a path forward, it is not planning to heavily differentiate between its user categories. Said Yuan, “I do not think we need to have a specific consumer strategy.
“Our strategy is: offer one service. No matter where you are, no matter what you do, no matter which device, we just help you to stay connected.”
Ensuring that users are satisfied whether they are using Zoom’s service for individual or institutional reasons is a priority, as their expectations will not change whatever their reason for logging on.
“We have to maintain a very consistent experience, so that’s why a lot of features we build for enterprise customers can be easily similar as they are … [for] prosumers and consumers,” Yuan said.
The challenge is striking the required balance of usability and security for users. “We want to leverage this opportunity to completely transform our business to be the most secure solution,” Yuan said.
“However, if there’s a conflict between the privacy security versus usability, I think privacy [and] security is more important than usability… At the same time, [we will] do all we can to [boost] the ease of use; that’s also critical.”
Sourced from WARC
