Remote work tools like Zoom have been having a banner year with the sudden onset of widespread remote work. The ability to connect with colleagues and clients individually and as a group, via real-time video, has created much-needed connection and collaboration in these isolating times.
But as many of us have discovered, simply staring at a gallery of people all day can be draining. No matter the creative backgrounds people use or how many cute cats walk across their owners’ keyboards, let’s face it: video meetings can get stagnant.
Zoom fatigue is real, but there are ways to make video-conferencing more engaging for employees and even boost productivity and efficiency. Hundreds of apps and integrations can enhance virtual meetings in all sorts of interesting and innovative ways.
Here are some of the top options to make Zooming a more useful and fulfilling experience for everyone involved.
Top Zoom Integrations for Remote Teams
With so many workers immersed in Slack to communicate all day, adding a Zoom integration supports quicker collaboration and adds operational efficiency by providing many of the same functions within the app as the Zoom platform itself. Users can start, schedule, join, record, and share a meeting right in a channel as well as monitor participants and meeting time. You can also provide automatic or custom messages to specific channels to remind them of upcoming meetings, agendas, and required preparation or materials.
Asana has proven a great tool for collaborative management of complex group projects. With a Zoom integration, meeting participants can plan and track tasks, deadlines, and statuses right from the platform for greater visibility and less confusion — no more toggling back and forth between screens and applications. Go into workspaces directly from Zoom to see lists of projects. Create, revise, comment on, or cross off tasks. Subscribe to notifications and comments to keep on top of changes and updates.
Zoom’s Gmail integration functions as an add-on within the mail tool, making the process of scheduling and launching meetings as simple as clicking a button in the sidebar. The integration pulls from contacts to enable users to instantly add people to invitations and start the meeting right from inside the mail environment, centralizing and streamlining meeting administration and planning.
Add a Zoom tab to the Teams platform to eliminate the friction of managing separate applications, and launch or schedule meetings on the spot. Click on the tab, type the @mention in a channel, or use the Zoom button in a text box to get going. An “availability” feature gives visibility into invitees’ calendars to support efficient planning.
With the ability to overlay visual images on a screen while a user talks, the Prezi Video integration promotes greater interaction, engagement, and memory retention by continuing the face-to-face connection during presentations. This integration is especially valuable for complex sales demos or trainings, as well as for teachers who want to hold students’ attention during remote instruction and classes.
Integrating Zoom with this popular CRM platform offers features that streamline sales activities and initiatives. Besides the ability to launch meetings inside the platform with customers and prospects, users can instantly add Zoom webinar registrants as new leads for follow-ups, and sync their details for automated campaigns. The integration also logs Zoom activity in users’ Salesforce histories for easy reference.
Adding the popular auto-transcribing tool as a Zoom integration allows for the transcription of virtual meetings in real time, reducing the need to take notes as well as the time and hassle of manually uploading a sound file for processing. Participants can view the shared transcription to add comments, highlight passages, and insert images to capture ideas and ensure accuracy without interrupting the meeting.
Create and manage surveys for internal or external use straight from Zoom chat with the integration of this popular survey platform, whether you are creating and sending a funny poll to kick off a meeting, collecting team sentiment about an issue, or devising and coordinating questions with coworkers for a marketing research initiative. The integration also enables notifications when respondents answer and provides instant visibility into their replies.
Zapier might be one of the most powerful integrations for Zoom, offering the ability to connect the platform with over 1500 apps and services to support customized workflow automation. Users can create triggers that put various actions across technologies into motion — such as notifying participants when a meeting or webinar is scheduled and adding it to their calendars, enrolling registrants in a webinar as soon as they submit payment, or adding registrants to newsletter and email lists.
Last but certainly not least, we at Sococo have our own Zoom integration that furthers our vision of the virtual office. Instead of disrupting the Sococo experience by forcing users outside the platform to sign on to Zoom, the integration enables you to instantly start meetings inside online offices and conference rooms. In addition, a badge on a virtual room alerts other users that a meeting is in progress, so you can join in or take note that those individuals are unavailable.
Whichever technologies your company uses, there’s sure to be a way to integrate some of them with Zoom for more productive, streamlined, and motivating video meetings.
See what it’s like to work in a virtual environment that mirrors the real-world office: Try Sococo with a free trial.
