There are a number of features that are available as Host of a conference call. People who regularly conduct conference calls are familiar with some of the more widely used Host Controls on a conference call like mute, un-mute and conference call recording. But, many customers do not familiarize themselves with all of the Host Controls that are available because if they did they would probably be used more often. A perfect example of this is the sub-conference feature available with Zip Conferencing’s conference call service.
Sub-conferencing allows you to place participants in a separate conference room so that you as the host of the conference call can have a private conversation with the participant. This can come in very handy in many situations and relieve you of the need to have a separate conference call with participants. One of the applications that immediately comes to mind with this feature is in the legal community. If a defendant and their attorney are meeting with a litigant and their attorney they frequently have a need to talk privately amongst themselves to discuss settlement offers, strategy and so forth. If they are in the same location when they are on the conference call then they can simply mute themselves and have a discussion and then rejoin the conference call. But if they are in separate locations they can’t accomplish this. With sub-conferencing they can go into their own conference call and have the discussion and then rejoin the main conference call when they are ready to continue the main discussion.
To engage a sub-conference from within the conference call, a Host would simple press *21 on their touch tone phone and follow the prompts. You can have as many as nine separate sub-conferences going on any conference call. Essentially you simply have participants enter one of the nine sub-conferences by entering the sub-conference room number between one and nine. The participants do need to be careful to enter the correct number of the sub-conference on the conference call. Any number between one and nine is valid when you engage the sub-conference feature so you want to make sure you go to the correct sub-conference.
Sub-conferencing is one of the many features available to the Host of the conference call by using the Host Control menu.