We Surveyed 500+ Zoom Breakout Users – Want To Know Their Top Frustrations?

We recently reached out to friends and facilitators who use zoom breakouts and asked them a couple open-ended questions:

• What do you like/dislike about zoom breakouts?
• What are your biggest frustrations, what do you find lacking about them (as either a host and/or participant)?

We received 100+ survey responses (and counting- folks are still sharing their input if you’d be so kind?)- many of them in great, lengthy detail. Ready to see what everyone said? 

Here are the most frustrating things about zoom breakouts:

The two most-frequently-mentioned zoom breakout limitations, by a wide margin, can be summarized as either:

1. It takes too much time to create breakouts, move people in/out/between the breakout groups; and/or, 
2. Once participants are in their breakouts, the host can’t speak into the groups to guide, facilitate, instruct, help participants, and vice versa.   

You can see the full list of zoom breakout limitations below.

Take a look- we’d love to hear what we missed, what other frustrations you’ve experienced when trying to use breakouts on zoom, how could they be improved, what would the “ideal” breakout experience (or virtual event experience in general) look like to you. 

Why Are We Sending Surveys About Zoom Breakouts?

Our team (MaestroConference) has been building a video platform focused on breakout functionality, and we want to make sure to address those limitations that we’re hearing from facilitators and virtual event professionals when it comes to other video conference tools, Zoom breakouts especially. 

Amazingly, the majority of those zoom breakout limitations mentioned in the survey responses, MaestroConference Video already satisfies – e.g. hosts not being able to send spoken and written instructions to groups, listen in on them, setting up groups ahead of time, etc. And we’re in the process of addressing several others. Here’s a list summarizing some of those key differentiators https://maestroconference.com/video.

(Related sidenote: an independent consultant facilitator told me last week that his client needed him to use zoom for an event and the breakouts the client wanted took 50[!!] minutes for him to create on zoom vs. 2-3 minutes it would have taken him on MaestroConference to create those same breakouts.)

We’ve not publicly released the new MaestroConference Video yet, we’re introducing it to strategic partners first. If you’re a zoom breakout power user and/or someone doing interesting, innovative things with remote work and virtual facilitation, we’d be happy to have you sneak preview/try out the platform in advance, use it for your events, give feedback, etc. Feel free to message me at julian@maestroconference.com to see if your team qualifies for a beta test group. 

And if you’re interested in hearing about the official launch of the all-new MaestroConference Video, let us know here. We look forward to sharing more about what we’re working on over the next few weeks.

—Full List of Zoom Breakout Limitations & Frustrations—