Today’s innovation in the field of communications is conducting meeting over the telephone. This becomes a communication vehicle of choice for telecommuters, remote sales offices, freelancers and company vendors. However, this creates specific difficulties, primarily because participants are not talking face to face. Hence, services offer a set of features to address some of the problems of this business conferencing. These innovated features guarantee conference organizers flexible and manageable teleconference availing business consumers face to face – like transactions.
Conference management includes:
- Call monitoring – this ensures that operator is available anytime during the conference. It allows participants to join in the middle of the discussion, or for other features to be accessed.
- Faxing – this process allows the head to distribute relevant materials for the meeting. A group of relevant documents are faxed to participants according to the cue of the moderator.
- Roll call – with this feature, the moderator as well as the rest of the conference participants know who is connected into the conference. An operator conducts roll call, asking each participant for his or her name.
- Sub-conferencing – this allows designated participants to communicate privately within the call. Sub-conference attendees can later return to the main conference. In most cases, many sub-conferences can be established within any one call.
The service includes additional features such as translation services, call recording and call transcription. But these services typically carry additional per-costs per service.
Business conferencing services can handle participants ranging from 1 – 3,000 people, thus requiring an additional feature for orderly discussion. For this large conference with only few speaker to deliver the subject matter, these features are used:
- Broadcasting – the action mutes the majority of the participants and only allows certain participants to speak to the rest. This relieves conferences of the inevitable background buzz coming from many participants.
- Question and answer – creates an orderly exchange of information by allowing participants to signal via phone when they have questions. The operator then calls on specific participants for their input.
- Polling – allows participants to vote on particular issues. By pushing a touch-tone button, participants can accept or reject proposals in the conference. The operator tallies votes in real time for the chairperson’s benefit. The result can also be provided in a printed summary if required.
One reason why telephone conferencing services got the broad scale adoption today is its quality. With all the clarity, phone conference has two most popular call services: (reservationless and operator-assisted)
- Reservationless Conferencing—this goes for impromptu meetings. Invitees get a toll-free call-in number and an entry code to be connected to the call. They’re fully automated, inexpensive and offer tons of advanced features such as global dial out, record/playback, conference lock, group mute/unmute, roll call capabilities and more.
- Operator-Assisted Phone conferencing—is for more formal meetings requiring additional services and a professional polish. Operator-assisted phone conferences are usually associated with “event calls”. They feature customized caller greetings, speaker introductions, operator-led Q&A, etc.
