Posts Tagged ‘Culprit’

Are Conference Calls Too Convenient?

Friday, January 8th, 2010

We are more connected than ever before.  Between the email, voice mail and BlackBerry or other PDA it is difficult to escape the endless stream of information from your work and personal life.  It just seems to me we are heading to where there is no escaping work and like many of the other modern day work convenience maybe conference calls are getting too convenient.

Let’s face it, you can do a conference call from anywhere.  Just like you can talk to people from anywhere, I don’t even want to know all the places that calls are done from, conference calls are as convenient as your next cell phone call.  When cell phones first came out the conference call service industry would discourage people from using them on a cell phone because they introduced a lot of noise and the networks were such that a dropped call during the conference call was pretty much a certainty.  So, naturally our customers would call us and complain about the conference call service because they were losing participants during the call of there was a lot of noise on the call.  And inevitably when our operators would join the conference call we would identify the culprit and most times it was a participant on the conference call on a cell phone.  Well that has certainly changed.  Now most of the participants on a conference call are probably on a cell phone.  With the cell phone networks improvement and better equipment you can join and participate on a conference call from anywhere you can get a cell phone signal.  And that is just about anywhere.

And now that people can get you just about anywhere they can also get you just about anytime.  People seem to expect that since you have a cell phone than I should be able to reach anytime, anywhere.  So, before when you would schedule a conference call with Asia, for instance, the participants would schedule the conference call for a time that was good for all concerned, knowing that people needed to be in the office during normal work hours to conduct the call.  But know it seems that people just assume you can get on a call anytime.  My wife, for instance, is regularly asked to attend conference calls with other parts of the world at all hours of the night.  The other night she had three conference calls from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm at night with Australia and Asia.  They just don’t seem to think that there are any boundaries since you are always accessible.

So, what do you think?  Are conference calls too convenient?

www.zipconferencing.com

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Conference Call Issues Unmasked

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Being in the conference call industry for over 14 years I have seen a lot of issues with conference calls.  And many of them are directly related to the conference call service company.  The technology to make a conference call is sophisticated and involves many components that can fail.  So naturally, no matter what measures a conference call company takes to prevent a conference call issue, they can still happen.  Luckily, over the years the technology has gotten better, and the other components have also gotten better.  Today, the conference calls are clearer and more reliable than ever.  So why do people still have problems on conference calls.  Some of the issues that occur on a conference call will never go away, because the issue is caused by the people on the conference call and that will never change.  Here are some of the common issues you will find on a conference call.

  • Echo – Echo on a conference call can be caused by many things, including issues with the telephone carrier.  But these days the issues that used to occur on a long distance call have largely been reduced to the point where it is unlikely that the long distance telecommunications carrier was the culprit.  Usually echo on a conference call is caused by one of the participants having more than one connection on the conference call up in close proximity to another connection.  Sometimes someone in a conference room with a speaker phone will also have another phone connected to the conference call.  To eliminate the echo you simply need to mute the offending connection and it will go away.
  • Noise on the call – It is not impossible for the telecommunications carrier or conference call service provider to have an issue, but these days the biggest introduction of noise onto a conference call is one of the participants.  Usually it is someone on a cellular phone and they are either in a moving vehicle or in a high noise situation like an airport.  The best way to eliminate the noise is for that participant to mute their line until they need to speak on the conference call and then they can just unmute themselves.
  • Hold Music on the call – Many people do not realize what their phone system sounds like to a caller when they place that caller on hold.  So, usually what happens is a participant will step away for a minute and place their phone on hold while they are in the conference call.  This will introduce whatever is on their phone system onto the entire conference call.  The way to eliminate this issue is to use the mute function in the conference call instead of placing your phone on hold.
  • Too little or too much volume – Sometimes a connection will have a low or high volume when connected to the conference call.  This can happen for many reasons.  Conference call service equipment adjusts connections automatically to compensate for different levels but you can also adjust the volume of individual participants from within the conference call.

So, as you can see most of the issues on a conference call these days are caused by the participants themselves.  And fixing these issues is usually not a big problem.  To assist with the correction of conference call issues, Zip Conferencing has operators available 24/7 from within the conference call to help identify and eliminate these problems.  You can reach an operator anytime by pressing *0 on your telephone from within the conference call.

www.zipconferencing.com

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