Posts Tagged ‘Touch Tone Phone’

Conference Call Sub-Conferencing

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

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.

www.zipconferencing.com

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Conference Call Host Controls

Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

Before the adoption of reservationless conference calls, conference callswere run by an operator and if you wanted something to be done on the call you simply asked the operator to perform the task.  Now you simply need to use your own touch tone phone to access a wide variety of conference call controls.  Commonly referred to as Host Controls, these commands allow the Host or Moderator of the conference call to control a number of features on the conference call.    Surprisingly, many people do not use these easy to use commands, perhaps most users are simply unaware of their availability and how easy they are to use. 

Here is a list of the Host Controls available with Zip Conferencing Conference Calls

Conference Shortcuts

- Press *1 to hear a help menu.

- Press *0 to reach an operator.

- Press *6 to mute or “un-mute” line.

- Press *4 to increase conference volume.

- Press *7 to decrease conference volume.

- Press *5 to increase your voice volume.

- Press *8 to decrease your voice volume.

 

Moderator Features:

- Press *91 to hear a participant count.

- Press *92 to hear a roll call of participants.

- Press *93 to disconnect all participant lines.

- Press *94 to lock or unlock conference.

- Press *95 to dial out to participants.

- Press *96 to mute all participant lines.

- Press *97 to un-mute all participant lines.

- Press *21 to activate Subconferencing.

- Press *22 to initiate record and playback (*22 again to pause/stop the recording)

- Press *31 to turn Conference Security Code on/off.

- Press *32 to record your Conference Introduction.

 

The two most used features are muting lines and recording the conference call.  Muting and UnMuting participants comes in handy if you have a large number of people on the conference call and you do not want background noise to interrupt your presentation.  It also is helpful for the participants when they are in a high noise situation and do not want to interrupt the conference call.  They can toggle this feature on and off so they can provide input during the call and then mute their line again when done. 

 

Recording of the conference call is very useful if you want to be able to retain a copy of the conference call or provide participants who missed the conference call the opportunity to hear it.  After recording the confernece call you can either provide participants a dial in number and pass code to listen to the recording, download the recording to your computer or order a CD of the recording for your records.

 

Other options for Host Controls on the conference call include the ability to conduct a sub-conference, volume adjustment and security features that ensure your conference call is only accessed by the people you want on the conference call.  Conference Call Host Controls are easy to use and provide access to valuable features on your conference call.

www.zipconferencing.com

 

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