As the corporate world continues to embrace remote work environments, our meeting tools have evolved to meet the needs of businesses. The Zoom platform itself has become ubiquitous in both corporate and personal settings. Video conferencing platforms are releasing new features to compete for the remote work market. One of the more recent features from Zoom allows companies to further brand their meeting experiences: the ability to customize your waiting room.
Custom Zoom Waiting Rooms for Businesses
In the past few years, we’ve all had the experience of clicking on a meeting link and “Waiting for the host to arrive.” Now, businesses can use the waiting room screen to personalize a message to their external meeting guests.
How to Customize Your Zoom Waiting Room
At Aptitude 8, we had clients, prospects and partners alike complimenting our custom waiting room within the first week of launching the feature. Our custom waiting room includes our Aptitude 8 logo, an editable welcome message, and a custom paragraph about our educational resources for businesses. Making the most of this space provides an opportunity to engage with your meeting guests and provide something of value while they wait for meetings to start.
How to Customize Your Zoom Waiting Room
Before you can begin customizing the waiting room, you should first ensure the waiting room is enabled for your guests. The waiting room can be customized at the account, group or user level, making it easy for your account administrators to set up the custom waiting room for your entire business at once.
In your Zoom account settings, navigate to the Security section and click “Customize Waiting Room.” This will enable you to access the three options for customizing the waiting room: the title, the logo, and the description. Once you’ve updated all three sections, click “Close” to save your changes.
Best Practices for Custom Zoom Waiting Rooms
Consider your audience.
Think about which external guests will be joining your meetings and what information might be most relevant to them. If different groups in your organization meet with different audiences, you can customize the waiting room at the group level. For example, you may want to feature a testimonial in the description section for your sales team users, but highlight a new product feature in that area for your services team since they usually speak with current customers.
Know your limits.
Each area of the custom Zoom waiting room has specifications that you must follow. The Title is limited to 64 characters. The logo cannot exceed 1 MB and the dimensions must be between the 60px minimum and 400 px maximum. Finally, the description section is limited to 400 characters. Planning out your messaging in advance will help you optimize these spaces for maximum impact with your audiences.
Update your employees.
Share a screenshot of your new custom waiting room settings with your employees so that they know what their guests will be seeing. Since internal employees will skip the waiting room, they won’t have access to your branded messaging ahead of time unless you inform them. By sharing the new messaging with the team, they can be prepared to answer any questions that their guests may have about the resources you shared in the waiting room.
