Do you need help to host quality, professional, and stress-free conference calls? Are the logistics of hosting large conference calls with multiple presenters or advanced A/V needs preventing you from making the most impact? Trouble keeping track of live Q&A or audience feedback during your conference call? It sounds like you need a conference call service that can help you showcase your business in the best possible light while keeping host anxiety at bay.
Whether in the financial industry, technology, education, or any other industry, your hosted conference call service matters. But how do you evaluate a conference call provider, and what should you look for in a top notch hosted conference call service? Let’s take a look.
- Call Quality: A reliable conference call service should provide high-quality audio conferencing capabilities with minimal disruptions or dropped calls. In addition, attendees should be able to join from any device, anywhere in the world. It’s the first ingredient in our recipe for conference call success!
- Reliability: One of the most critical areas to explore with prospective conference call service providers is their reliability record. You should see solid uptime, minimal call drops or disruptions, and a stable network infrastructure that ensures all participants can easily connect.
- Security: Your conference calls often share detailed company information, including financials, corporate strategy, and customer data- information that’s too important risk on a mediocre conference calling service. Instead, look for a secure conference call service with robust security features such as end-to-end encryption, password protection, and two-factor authentication to protect your calls from unauthorized access. For an extra layer of security and convenience, the best conference call service providers typically offer separate codes for meeting managers versus participants.
- Ease of use: The conference call service should be user-friendly, with a simple interface that makes it easy for participants to join and manage calls, whether on desktop or mobile.
- Scalability: Is your business poised for growth? Your conference call provider should be too. Ensuring it’s scalable to meet your company’s needs today and in the future without sacrificing call quality or reliability is definitely on our list of what to look for in a conference call service.
- Integration: Do your employers work in silos, or is your company flush with collaboration masters? Similar to your people, your conference calling provider should integrate seamlessly with others, playing nicely with existing systems and tools such as your CRM, email, calendars, messaging apps, and more.
- Customer support: Having an incredible customer support with quick response times and knowledgeable operators who resolve issues isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. A customer support team should be easily accessible and exceptionally responsive. Your time matters, as does that of your audience, and nothing is worse than dead air on a live conference call.
- Cost: While you may not always get the cheapest solution, you should be prepared to pay a little more if you truly want a premium conference call service. With that, however, comes piece of mind. As long as your conference calling provider is transparent and provides the cost justification you need, you’re moving in the right direction. Some conference call providers may offer flexible pricing options to meet your organization’s budget and needs, which is clearly better than a one-size fits all approach.
- Special features: Features like virtual backgrounds, whiteboards, and chat/messaging add professionalism and collaboration abilities to your call. Virtual backgrounds make it comfortable to turn your video on no matter where you’re calling from, and whiteboards are a great way to share ideas visually and collaborative in real time. With chat/messaging features, participants can communicate with each other and the meeting host during the call without interrupting it.
Of course, there are certainly more features to explore with potential conference call providers, like recording and playback capabilities, as well as moderated Q&A sessions. We could go on. But it comes down to the conference calling provider’s experience so you’ll want to learn more about their customers and recent projects as well.
At CIA Omnigage, we enable customers to execute large conference calls and quarterly earnings release calls with ease. We’ll kick off your project with a pre-conference meeting to understand your needs, and our dedicated operator assisted conference call service is just the beginning of what we provide. Our turnkey, white-glove approach to conference call solutions means superior bandwidth, exceptional audio sound quality, content sharing, and slide presentations, hosted Q&As, event archiving, detailed participation logs, burstable capacity, and much more. Contact us today to learn more, and you’re well on your way to hosting a successful conference call.