Conference call services have long been a staple of global business operations. Long before some of today’s largest companies came into existence, CEOs and stakeholders alike would routinely meet in group calls that traversed the public telephone service across states and countries. Those calls were also expensive and difficult to establish.
A lot has changed since the early days of multi-user calling. You no longer need your own private server to complete intra-office calls, and you no longer need to pay exorbitant fees to join three or more individuals separated by just as many time zones. Like many similar products, our Dash Business Phone System, which offers Conferencing as a primary feature, takes advantage of widespread high-speed internet access to facilitate calls cheaply and at a higher quality than ever before.
This means that more companies can reap the benefits that the (now) simple conference call has to offer. According to a study from Gos International, the audio conferencing market is expected to grow 4.9% from 2016-2020 to a total valuation of $6.2 billion. And this could all happen, Gartner reports, while individual customer spending drops due to the availability of low-cost SIP services.
With all that in mind, let’s break down two of conferencing’s greatest benefits: money savings and workplace efficiency.
Save Money By Saving Time
By replacing an in-person meeting with a conference call, you save your participants a lot of time.
Any attendees who work outside your office will need to walk, taxi, or take a metro to reach your location. Even for a small company, the aggregate time those individuals spend traveling could reach in the dozens of hours for a simple weekly get-together.
Those dozens of hours translate to lost opportunity costs because the attendees could have been working on other tasks during the time they were in transit. If those travelers are your employees, then you’re losing money every time you have a meeting.
This effect even reaches into meetings you might have with stakeholders or potential hires – people whose personal opportunity costs don’t necessarily affect your finances. Consider that, if you pay for someone’s travel, whether it’s by car or plane, that expense could be erased with a conference call.
With only these few examples, it’s straightforward to figure out that time can easily equate to money. When you save your participants time by calling them, you save them and your business money.
Become More Efficient
It won’t take long for you to develop an efficient routine when conducting conference calls. After a handful of virtual meetups, you’ll have a system in place that schedules a meeting time, notifies participants, starts the session, and hopefully runs through your bullet points in record time.
Your regular participants – again, likely your employees – should also have their own routines that move them quickly into and out of any meeting. Then they can get back to work and resume their to-do lists without having to leave their desks.
Such efficiency should lead to shorter, more effective interactisavingons which will become essential in emergency meetings – like ones that take place when a new product feature breaks.
Make a Conference Call in Dash
Our Dash Business Phone System, which now includes Conferencing for free, lets you save money and be more efficient from day one. You can easily provide multiple users with the ability to host a conference. From there, your users can invite participants with a phone number and PIN, which keeps the meeting private and allows for easy access.
If you aren’t using a virtual phone service for your conferencing, or if you haven’t taken advantage of conferences yet in your own office, there’s no better time than the present. Your time is valuable. Make the switch today.
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