August 4, 2008

Conference Calls Bursting Your Budget? Explore New Options.

Conference Calls can be an expensive part of doing business. You pay per minute charges and if you do many conference calls the costs can add up. Of course the famed Freeconferencecalls.com has free conference calling but the length of time of the conference call is 4 hours and there is a limit of 150 persons which can be on the call. Although a free conference call solution works for many businesses, you might want to consider paying for a higher level of features - such as more control of the phone call and knowing who is on the call, allvia a web interface.

Like all technology, you should always re-evaluate your technology to ensure you're getting the best value, with the most features, for your needs. If you are conducting more telephone conferences, especially if you are trying to travel less and save more gas money, it's even more important that you try to SAVE as much money as you can.

Vapps has a service, HiDefConferencing which offers a quite economical and feature rich solution, leverage Skype as one part of a solution to lower costs further.

One of their customers is, Silverpoint, which provides web design and development for schools with a significant number of clients spread across the country. Silverpoint Chief Financial Officer Andrew McKenzie said,"We were spending almost $500 a month on conferencing alone and our costs were steadily increasing," said . "Now we're spending a flat $200 a month. While the cost savings are great, the ability to connect to the conference line in one-click with Skype, without tying up the phone lines so we can interface with customers, is equally valuable."

As you are looking for an audio conference solution, it's important to look into a solution that's easy to use for your end users. Vapps' web interface enables one-click conference calling for Silverpoint's entire organization, allows meeting coordinators to schedule a meeting in the future and ensures that only the correct people are on the call through the ability to identify each participant individually. Meeting attendees are notified either by a Skype IM message or an email.

If you are not using audio conferencing in your business, consider doing so.

Vapps' web-based tools have also become a vital part of Silverpoint's ability to conduct webinars for its clients to keep them updated on new products. By using its Vapps conferencing line and another web-based program to share an online screen with participants, Silverpoint is able to save a significant amount of money over using conventional webinar services such as Webex or GoTo Meeting.

"Having the web interface from Vapps really made that possible because we could see who was on the call, mute the call and un-mute it when it was time to take questions," McKenzie said.

One advantage of a web interface as opposed to only using phone commands is the ease in which you can better control the audio conference.

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