When I tell people what I do for a living they are surprised that there is an industry that exists to provide conference call services to businesses. Many people think that the phone company is who provides the service. Which has always been true. But private companies have been providing a higher level of service for lower costs since the divestiture of AT&T in the early 1990s. The other thing that people want to know is why people don’t just use their phone system which usually has the capacity to run a conference call. Well, there are a number of reasons to use a conference call service instead of a phone system conference button to hold a conference call.
- Phone systems have capacity issues – Most phone systems can only handle a limited number of participants on a conference call. And you are also limited by the overall number of phone lines on the system. If the people in the office are using a number of lines to make calls you may be limited with the number of people you can get on a conference call.
- Phone systems require you to connect the participants – In order to connect people to a conference call using your phone system you will need to dial out to the participants through the phone system. You have to get the people on the phone and sometimes they may be on the phone or out of their office and you can reach them by dialing out to them.
- Call quality on a phone system degrades as you add participants – Phone systems are not made to hold conference calls and as you add participants the voice quality in the conference call degrades. The more people you add the worse the overall quality of the conference call.
- Most people have difficulty operating the conference call function on a phone system – Since there is no standard on how the phone systems assemble a conference call you will need to learn how to assemble a conference call using the phone system. Most people do not use this function often enough to be proficient at it and are not able to smoothly carry out the procedure.
The bottom line is a phone system does not provide a high quality conference call experience compared to a conference call service. A good conference call service company provides a service that is easy to use and gives you an experience that is equal in quality to meeting in person. And at the rates that conference call services are currently available it is no wonder that most people opt to do a conference call using a conference call service instead of a phone system.