Posts Tagged ‘Amount Of Money’

A Conference Call for a Company Announcement

Monday, October 18th, 2010

A customer recently called and needed to speak to all of their employees quickly in order to make an announcement about the acquisition of the company.  They are not a regular conference call user but thought that it may suit their needs.  Well, needless to say, this company was so impressed by the capabilities of our service they have since become a regular user of conference calls for more applications within their business.  Why are conference calls so well suited to making a company announcement?

Many times a company announcement is necessary to quickly get the word out to employees about an important milestone in your company’s history. A conference call is best suited for these types of announcements because it would otherwise be impossible in most cases to get the employees together quickly. Many times the employees are scattered around the country or around the world and just can’t physically get together that easily. Then there is the cost of getting everyone together. Even if you have the time to pull everyone together the cost of getting a group of employees together can be exorbitant. A conference call allows you to get the employees together quickly and easily for a relatively small amount of money.

Depending on the size of the group you may want to customize your conference call with some features that will make the call a success. With Zip Conferencing you can do this yourself by selecting the conference options you want on the conference call through your own interface. A couple of options I would recommend would be the Music on Hold option and silence entry and exit. Music on Hold makes it so your participants will listen to music until the moderator joins the conference call. Otherwise a large group of participants will be making noise and your audience will wonder when the conference call will begin. Entry and exit tones silenced for the conference call will also reduce distracting noises for the participants and the moderator alike. Another conference call option you may want use is muting all participants. As moderator of the call you have the ability to mute all participants on the conference call. That way your audience will not hear any distracting noises while you make your announcement. After you have made your announcement you can then open up the lines for questions or comments.

With Zip Conferencing you can host up to 300 participants on a conference call and do a company announcement without having to pull all of the employees together.

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Conference Calls for Earth Day

Thursday, April 22nd, 2010

Earth Day reminds us to do whatever we can to help save our environment because its resources are limited and fragile.  And one of the things we now understand is reducing our “carbon footprint”.  This means to reduce our emissions and use of resources and one of the easiest ways to do this is to reduce our travel whether it is by car, train or plane.  There is no easier way to reduce your business travel then to replace your in person meetings with a conference call or a web conference.

In person meetings are great.  You get to shake hands, look people in the eye and connect with others the way you can’t when you are on a remote meeting.  But every meeting doesn’t need to be in person.  If you know the people you are meeting with and have met before you don’t really need to meet in person every time.  And by doing some of your meetings by way of conference calls and web conferencing you can hold just as effective a meeting as if you were in person without the travel expense and do your part to reduce your carbon footprint.  Holding a conference call or web conference has never been easier.  Services are widely available, affordable and very easy to use.  At this point just about everyone has been on a conference call that utilizes a toll free number and a pass code.  You simply dial the access number and put in your code and you are connected to the other people that did the same.  You can meet with hundreds of people at once if you like and you can meet any time you like.  A web conference is just as easy and allows you to share your desktop or do a presentation from your PC as easily as if the people were in the same room.  You can even use a camera and send participants your own video feed if you really want to add that in person feeling.   And while you are being a good steward of the Earth you also will be saving a good amount of money and time using conference call services as an alternative.

If only a fraction of meetings today were replaced with conference calls and web conferencing we would save millions of tons of carbon emissions.  And lets face it, there are a lot of meetings that are not worth the gas to get there. 

And using a conference call instead of driving to an appointment is many times just a matter of thinking to do it.  So on Earth Day it gives us one more reason to think to do a conference call benefiting everyone concerned, even the Earth.

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Free Conference Calls

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

I am sure you have seen them if you have done a search for conference calls on the internet.  Free conference calls.  So what is the deal?  Are they really free?  How do they afford to do that?

Well I am sure you have also heard the saying, “There is no such thing as a Free Lunch” and with free conference calls it is all too true.  First of all who had the idea in the first place and how do they make money?  A number of years ago someone had the idea to give away conference calls in order to generate traffic to a carriers’ network, because the carrier gets paid by the long distance carriers a small amount of money to terminate the call on the local network.  So, even though to you the conference call is “free” the conference call service provider is paid by the carrier for the traffic they are generating.  So, then it is a Free Conference Call, right?  Not exactly.

The problem with the free conference call is that you have to pay a long distance charge to whoever your long distance provider is in order to get to the location where their conference call equipment is installed.  Let’s say that their equipment is in Kansas City for instance.  You and all of your participants have to pay the long distance charge, per minute to connect to Kansas City.  Now that rates for toll free conference calls have come down, why would you want to have hidden charges for you and your participants?

There are other problems with many of these free conference call services.  Some are using VOIP to connect the call resulting in poor quality.  Many will have capacity issues because they really can’t afford to have lots of equipment sitting idle because their financial model is so thin.  Many of the conference call features you will get with a toll free conference call service provider are not available with a free conference call service provider.  In order to compensate for some of these shortfalls some of the free providers started offering toll free conference calls as well.  But the pricing for these services is higher than some of the conference call service providers that are built to provide a high quality service like Zip Conferencing.  So, you end up paying a higher price for a lower grade of service. 

So, why would anyone use a free conference call service?  Because its “free”.  In the end, like so many other things in life, with conference calls you get what you pay for.

www.zipconferencing.com

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