Your boss has just approached you with a new priority task: find an audio conference service that will provide your company with reliable services, excellent customer support and a billing structure that fits well with your corporate model. And oh yes, they must have a competitive rate for those services. How to approach this daunting task? Here’s a few tips.
Identify the Basic Service Platform You Need
These days, types of audio conferences are usually grouped into two categories: reserved and reservationless.
Reserved services would include conference types that require you to contact the service provider and schedule a conference call for a specific call type, date and time, number of lines, and a specified duration. Within this scenario, your options include an operator dialed conference (you provide names and phone numbers for your attendees to the call center, and an operator connects them at your scheduled start time); a toll free operator attended service (you receive a toll free number for your conference, and an operator greets each party who dials in, requests the caller’s name and any other information you have asked to be collected, then places the party into your conference); and a fully automated toll free service (upon scheduling the conference, you receive a toll free number and a passcode, which you distribute to your attendees.
At the time of the conference, they dial the toll-free number, the conference bridge system queries them for the passcode, and they are placed directly into the conference without any operator intervention.)
Most companies still offer toll services that are comparable to the toll free service offerings. For some organizations, toll services may be a viable option if (a) your conference activity is limited to in house and you have a very aggressive long distance rate in place for all the relevant locations; and (b) you are a not for profit organization and your attendees do not mind paying a long distance charge through their own long distance carrier in order to attend the conference. Even within this scenario, make sure you crunch the numbers. Because most conference call bureaus do not have as many lines provisioned for toll usage as they do for toll free, your overall cost may be higher than using a toll free service.
Reservationless services eliminate the need to schedule each conference call with your service provider. By establishing a separate host account for each person within your organization that is authorized to conduct a conference, you will ensure that conferences can be made with consistent toll-free dial in numbers and passcodes. Reservationless host accounts are available for use twenty four hours a day, seven days a week.
Typically, conference call bureaus that offer reservationless services will provision each host account with anywhere from twenty to sixty lines that can be used at any time. However, be sure to read the fine print. There are some providers that offer reservationless conferencing, but their lines are on a first come first serve basis; they will not guarantee line availability at all times of the typical business day. This could result in a situation where not all of the attendees slated for a meeting will be able to access the conference.