AntonioDiaz - stock.adobe.com
Zoom CEO praises impact of partners
Channel helping comms player take more market share and bring fresh customers on-board
The channel has been highlighted as one of the factors that contributed to Zoom Communications’ decent third-quarter performance, with partners helping the comms player seal more contact centre deals.
For the three months ended 31 October, Zoom Communications delivered a 4.4% increase in revenues to $1.23bn. In that enterprise revenue was $741.4m, up 6.1% year-over-year, and online revenue improved by 2% to reach $488.4m.
The firm highlighted its numbers had been improved by its quest for new customers, with the business ending the quarter with 4,363 customers contributing more than $100,000 in trailing 12 months revenue, up 9.2% year-on-year. Zoom reported a trailing 12-month net dollar expansion rate for Enterprise customers of 98%. The Online average monthly churn of 2.7% in Q3 was flat year-on-year.
In terms of adding customers, the efforts around the contact centre got a shoutout from senior management in the call with analysts following the release of the Q3 numbers.
When asked where partners had made an impact, Eric Yuan, founder, president, CEO and chairman of Zoom Communications, focused in on the contact centre area, pointing out that partners had been instrumental in working with customers looking to make a switch in their supplier.
“Many of them are switching from other cloud vendors to Zoom Contact Centre,” he said. “That’s the reason why channel partners are becoming our most important go-to-market strategy for our contact centre solution. We are doubling down not only for the US market, but for the international market as well, because the contact centre is very different buyers and the channels become increasingly important.”
He indicated it had made investments in the channel and would continue to support partners to ensure it could reach more enterprise and SME customers.
Channel-driven deals
Michelle Chang, chief financial officer at Zoom, expanded on Yuan’s comments and revealed the extent to which the channel had been sealing deals around that side of the business.
“We look at top-10 deals in contact centres as reflective of the demand and the customer signal that we see,” she said. “It’s helpful – nine out of 10 of our largest deals were channel-driven. It’s a very important investment to us, and we’re very pleased with the results.
“For a company that’s going to focus on phone and customer experience [CX], having a healthy, vibrant channel ecosystem is just part of the game, meaning it’s how customers often want to buy,” added Chang. “We’re just very pleased with a lot of the forward-looking metrics that we see with our channel ecosystem.”
Yuan said the firm was continuing to eye fresh opportunities and would be taking advantage of increased AI capabilities.
“Zoom is continuing to build on our vision of an AI‑first platform that helps people connect and collaborate more seamlessly,” he said.
“This quarter, we announced AI Companion 3.0, and we’re thrilled to see AI Companion adoption grow meaningfully,” added Yuan. “We’re also seeing strong momentum with Custom AI Companion and our AI‑first Customer Experience suite, which helped make this one of our best CX quarters, with broad AI adoption across major deals.”
