[Business]
Communication is a ubiquitous fact of business – but just as it is ever-present, it also comes in many forms.
A big part of deciding the budget is figuring out what kind of money should be invested in tech with which to talk to clients – over the Internet, smartphone, or a string telephone if things get really desperate.
But there’s more to it than calling customers and talking to clients. Communication at the workplace has to be facilitated as well, even if the workspace is spread across the globe with freelancers and employees from NSW, to the edge of Queensland, and the main office in Sydney. That’s where video conferencing comes in – it’s more than just communication, it is interconnectivity. The kind today’s businesses need if they want to stay efficient and sharp.
Why Video Conferencing Is Superior to Telephone Calls or Emails: Video conferencing and regular calling are two entirely separate realms of communication – and the differences become even more striking when you factor in emails.
But it isn’t strictly about capability – the question for small businesses is more along the lines of: “why pay for video conferencing when free VOIP services, telephones, social media and emails can cover all our basic necessities for communication?”
The answer to that question is – company efficiency and return on investment. Yes, video conferencing requires you to pay for the service – but you get what you paid for, and in some cases even more. It’s not just about interconnectivity for exchanging messages and setting up meetings – video conferencing technology can be used to safely and securely send files, as well.
File Sharing Through Video Conferencing Software: Due to the integration of cloud-based technology in video conference software providers, video conferencing has moved into new territory. Specifically, file sharing. The cloud is becoming an increasingly important part of IT for companies all over the world with plenty of room for growth, with 55 percent of companies using cloud-based companies stating that most of their services aren’t on the cloud, but are already built to be cloud-friendly according to industry expert RightScale.
Meeting managers can set up a conference call, and then invite all meeting members to join in. Then, they can distribute files, play videos, open and present slideshows, and use all form of visual media to illustrate their point.
This doesn’t just work to brief employees, but can also be done as a private presentation for potential clients, or while communicating with long-term clients to present them with statistics – for example, a marketing firm can hold a monthly conference call with a client to discuss the data gathered in lieu of the month’s marketing progress: website and social media page views and interaction, public polling results, the success rate of one campaign over another, changes in sales and revenue and so on.
Taking Charge of Company Meetings with Video Conferencing: Meetings are particularly notorious time-wasters. From being preoccupied, to daydreaming, to straight up falling asleep (according to Atlassian.com, nearly 40 percent are guilty of it!) many meetings simply lead to hours of lost time per week, and billions in lost potential revenue for the global market. But that doesn’t make them useless.
It just makes them flawed. Meetings can be fixed, and through them, hundreds of hours saved. The answer? Focus on conference meetings. By having meetings take place at the workstation instead of an actual meeting room, you can avoid the association between meeting rooms and naptime. You can also use video conference software to provide more visual information to feed to your meeting members – resulting in them paying more attention to the topic at hand.
Video conferencing can help you, as a meeting manager, drive the direction of the meeting and call for better engagement by having everyone individually add their own input to the discussion from the comfort of their home or office, from everywhere and anywhere in the world.
Equipment Doesn’t Matter – All Devices Are Applicable: In the past, video conferencing was clunky, expensive, and required entire rooms to be wired up with audio and video systems, and the right infrastructure to relay both feeds over thousands of miles to the other side of the Earth.
Today, video conferencing is as easy as downloading an app on your smartphone, and logging into an account. Or, if you’ve been invited, it’s as easy as clicking on a link. Video conferencing software works on browsers, it works on tablets, on phones, on computers, and some companies like BlueJeans have software that works on dedicated video conferencing equipment.
Best of all, businesses can actually intercommunicate across platforms – so someone on their phone can be in a video conference call with a dozen people on their computers and laptops, with similar or the same level of access to shared files and videos.
Video Conferencing Can Actually Save You Time and Money: As Mashable.com points out, 80 percent of queried businesses have found value in telecommuting, and would like to use it more often. Video conferencing eliminates travel time. It eliminates hours wasted in useless meetings. It eliminates the time spent trying to send files across offices on undedicated networks. And best of all, it’s nowhere near as expensive as it used to be.
In the end, video conferencing could be more aptly named video collaboration – helping your team collaborate with itself, and your business collaborate with its clients to bring them a better service.
