Can you hear me?

During a recent company meeting our CTO showed a clip that I am sure demonstrated in many people’s eyes their experience of using a third party audio conferencing solution, naturally the results are quite amusing!

Common complaints I hear are voices cutting in and out, background noise, forgetting access information, poor sound quality, as well as the cost of using these services. One of our customers actually spent in excess of £3.5k a month on a third party audio conference service!

Now of course some of those issues can be related to mobile participants or perhaps a poor ISDN line quality or poor bandwidth allowance, certainly with the landline issue that can be addressed by ensuring that what you have in place is competent and up to task. I guess you would then need to ask yourself the following questions; ‘Is mine suffering the same issue?’ or ‘what do our customers think?’

Poor call quality, attendees dropping in and out, external factors… the list goes on! Joining a call and only hearing bits of what the attendee is saying can be frustrating.

Imagine it from the customer’s perspective.

Imagine the scenario, potential customer joins the conference call, let’s call him Pete. After forgetting his access code too many times, Pete is kicked off the call. After referring back to his email (which he deleted as he didn’t think he needed it) Pete finally enters the right access and is in the room. After introducing himself to himself, Pete is then joined by the host, let’s call her Diane. Following his second introduction, Pete can barely hear Diane as s  e kee s cut t n g  u t (see how annoying that is to read, let alone to listen to?!).

After then dropping out of the call then back in, Diane and Pete are then joined by another colleague – Carl. After the third round of introductions (during which Diane drops out again) all three now can continue the call and eventually they almost come to a natural end, well almost. Carl, Pete and Diane all get kicked off due to the hosted audio room shutting down. Put simply, Diane thought using a free one would be a good idea and would meet her requirements so therefore why should she have to pay for it?

Perhaps time for a rethink…

It’s important to take into consideration all of the potential issues that can arise from not properly investing in an audio conferencing solution, a few of which outlined above.

Our award nominated IP solution, Touch Telephony, includes a personal conference room that enables the owner of the room to manage the call from start to finish. The owner can mute participants, invite them to the call via email or initiative drag and drop, find out who is talking via talk detection indicator, hang individuals/all callers up, check that all participants are in the room and include external parties to the call all with the above actions.

The customer I mentioned earlier subsequently signed up and paid for the IP service in just under a year comparing the monthly costs of the audio conferencing service with our IP service…food for thought?

Take a look at the video I mentioned earlier – well worth a watch!

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_tiqlBFjbk[/embed]