I know I have blogged about conference calls and web conferencing and how it can save you money. But I thought it would be useful to use a real life example to illustrate just how dramatic the savings can be when you choose to conduct a meeting using a web conference instead of an in person meeting.
A customer had an instance where they really needed to go to Hong Kong from New Jersey to have a meeting with a new customer to discuss the implementation of their services. And under normal conditions this type of meeting in person is very typical for this customer and they would not use a web conference for the implementation phase of their service. But in this case the customer had an issue where they wanted to have a pre-m eeting with this vendor and discuss how the implementation would work with one of their contacts before they had the actual meeting. So, the customer requested that the vendor come out and have a meeting and then return to have the actual implementation meeting. This meant that two employees would need to fly from New Jersey to Hong Kong which is a 16 hour flight for a four hour meeting and then return to New Jersey only to go back to Hong Kong the following week. And for those of you who have not had to do this flight it is not only long, it is expensive. It costs $1,800 for a coach seat and almost $9,000 for a business class seat each. The bottom line for the vendor was that the four hour meeting was going to cost about $5,000 and several days of productivity from two employees.
In steps Web Conferencing to save the day. The vendor convinced the customer that they could do a web conference for the pre-meeting at least and spend as much time as is necessary to go through the implementation planning. The customer agreed and the web conference went off without a hitch and made the customer feel comfortable about the upcoming meeting. The customer and the vendor were able to interact on the web conference just like they were in the same conference room and accomplish everything that needed to be done. The meeting ended up lasting about 3 hours and cost the vendor $29 using Zip Conferencing’s web conference service. Using web conferencing saved the vendor $5,000 and allowed them to conduct the meeting without any sacrifice in results and also saved a lot of time for the employees increasing the company’s productivity.
These kind of events happen all the time and is the reason that web conferencing is growing so fast. Customers immediately experience the real life benefits of conducting a web conference instead of an in-person meeting.
