Saturday, June 30, 2012

Using Conference Calls

By James Crutch


Conferencing is a method of organizing meetings or events that can be shared with people positioned at distant locations. It is considered to be one of the best methods to interact with people who are located remotely.

Businesses need an enthusiastic and dedicated work force focused more and more on their quality of work. And if a company has offices worldwide, it becomes a challenge for the company to get all its employees on the same page. The rising number of virtual employees has forced these companies to adopt new cost effective ways to communicate. Therefore, they've begun to meet via various electronic applications such as VoIP phones, Unified instant messaging, and conferencing, which include Tele, Web and Videoconferencing.

With these methods in place, events and meetings should be simple and quick to start with and flawless and error-free. These should all be in real-time with minimum delay. One of the key concerns while using conferencing is the fidelity of the call. Companies commonly use a specialized telecom service provider who maintains the conference bridge, or who provides the phone numbers and PIN codes that members can dial to access the meeting or conference call. With the suitable and apt conferencing solution, smooth and effective multi person response can be achieved, thus making remote conferencing a trouble-free process for listeners and talkers.

Sometimes, the end-to-end process of carrying out or dealing the business via a conference call can be frustrating. Despite of all the above factors to make the conference calls user-friendly, there are a number of general causes of poor quality conference calls. Some of them are stated below:

In spite of giving a time with a meeting request, people do not show up for the calls. People forget to put their phones on mute when not speaking. This creates un-necessary background noise. Lack of acquaintance with equipment and technology could also be an issue. When the call is multi-person, there is high probability of 2 people speaking at the same time. Sometimes there's a deficiency of a moderator or a host. Occasionally there is poor management by the call-initiator. And, lastly sometimes people forget that they are in conference call. There is a lack of familiarity with manners and etiquettes.

Even though many businesses are plagued by poor quality conference calls for all the above reasons, the demand for effective conference calls continues. As we cannot ignore the problems, the only way to improve the quality of conference calls is to improve our conferencing skills. Let's not make these common conferencing mistakes which cause problems for everyone using conference calls.




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