When you’re having a conference call you have the ability to call out to participants from a live call. You can either do this from the web conference screen, or you can manually perform a call out if you’re hosting a conference that is audio only.

Using call out for conferencing is a great tool for when you are missing individuals that you need on the call, when someone is traveling, or if someone failed to sign up for the conference, but you want to make sure they can join.

Send an Invite by Email – Audio & Web Instructions

Click on ‘Invite’ and click ‘Invite by Email’

Enter the persons email address. Our system will generate an email that will send the party the audio conference instructions as well as the web conference link they will need to go to. This kind of invitation is really helpful if you’ve used some kind of pre-registration system and have a last minute user who needs to join the conference. Once they get the email you won’t need to do anything else to get them to join the conference.

Send an Audio Invite to a Group

Click on ‘Invite’ and ‘Invite by Phone – Group’

Before your conference, you can preload a group of contacts into your account. When you click to invite the group, the automated message will be delivered to multiple parties at once. The invitation will give everyone the options to join, decline, or request a five minute call back.

Send an Audio Invite to an Individual

Click on ‘Invite’ and ‘Invite Individual by Phone’

Enter a phone number and our system will call them with an automated message to join the conference by pressing one, receive another call in five minutes by pressing two, or disregard the invitation by pressing three. It’s a great option for someone who might be between meetings or someone who is using a using a speakerphone or internet phone that may be having trouble entering in their conference code.

Call Directly to an Individual on a Live Audio Conference

1. Press *1 on your telephone keypad.
2. Dial the number for the party you want to reach. (Note: If they are an international party, you will need to call out to them using the 011 prefix.)
3. Once you hear their voice on the other end of the call, you can briefly bring them up to date and then press *2 when you’re ready to join you both back to the conference call. There’s a few seconds of delay between when you rejoin the conference and when the new participants line opens up, so whenever I outdial I like to use the intro tones so that I know exactly when that happens.

If they don’t answer when you call them, press *3 to terminate the outdial and join you back to the conference so you can try again.

Conference call out is useful to help you get the people on your conference that are imperative to the call. Don’t want to mess with it? No worries – one of our operators can perform an outdial for you. Give us a call to find out more about operator outdial conference calls.

Last month, we rolled out our completely revamped web conferencing software. If you read our blog post about the announcement, you know we’re very excited about it. If not, you should, it’s a great introduction to the web conference system.

Since more of our new and current customers are calling us to ask about the program, I’ve noticed that we all have different ways of explaining things. I put together a useful tool to help you understand the terms that we’re using as they apply to our web conference system.

Webinar - Lots of people use this term differently, but to us a webinar is simply where you’re having a conference with a visual element.

Application Sharing – From the list of opened programs on your computer you can select any one of those programs to share with your participants. It limits the exposure of your computer screen and any notifications you get while sharing.

Audio Over the Web – Participants can now choose the option to listen to the audio streaming over the web. If they choose this option, they will not be able to participate in the audio portion of the conference, like raising their hand for questions.

Moderators – A moderator is a person who will control the aspects of the conference call. This includes the audio portions and sharing information.

Speaker - A speaker is different from a moderator in the sense that they can only share their programs and applications. They cannot remove participants or control the audio portions of the conference call. It’s a great way to invite different people to your conference line without having to give out your moderator code.

Conference Controls – There are two different sets of controls on web conferencing. One set of controls is for your sharing of information, like your desktop or video. The other will help you control and moderate your audio portions of your web conference.

Desktop Sharing – Different from application sharing, this option will share your entire display. It’s an easy choice when you have a lot of different things that you need to show. There is some risk with desktop sharing because anything that is on your computer will be shown to participants – including instant messages, email alerts, or web browsing.

Those are just some of the terms that you might hear one of our operators going over with you. If you want to know more about our web conferencing options give us a call and we can answer any of your questions about these options and more.

Last Wednesday as I was scrolling through Twitter, I learned that the loud bang I heard outside of my house was not the wind, as I thought, or a gun shot, as no police officers showed up, but the sound of an explosion of a fertilizer plant in West, Texas.

Over the following week, I gained a lot of information about that and other things going on around in the world from Twitter. While it’s been a great place to gather real information, it’s also a place that you can get lost in the web of misinformation. Even the most well-known of news rooms fell victim to announcing things before they were fully confirmed which caused a firestorm of Twitter snark.

It’s a good teaching place though, especially for those of us who feel like Twitter is a great place to find "real-time" information, but the events surrounding last week should also teach us some caution.

1. Tread Carefully – While “citizen journalists” can be a useful place for information in an unfolding situation, you need to be somewhat cautious about what and whom you believe. Not too long ago, I heard that a school near my hometown was on lockdown and I took to Twitter to see if I could find any information “on the ground”. What I saw was a ton of misinformation that the issue was related to everything from an active shooter on campus to nothing. It turned out the school was locked down as a precaution in response to a robbery nearby.
2. Wait Before You RT – Look, I understand that we all want to share breaking news and events, and most of us aren’t official journalists. So, what’s the rush? Even a journalist will take the time to check their sources and make sure that it’s true. Let your finger hover over the RT of the tweet from @teenagermakingthingsup until you see it’s been verified. It’s better to spread correct information than to have to go back and apologize for being "had".
3. Check the Hashtag – I had no idea the @AP had been hacked until I logged into Twitter and saw the trending topic about bombs in the White House. For a moment, I was full of fear. It’s been a long week. Then I clicked on the topic to see more information and saw everything advising me it was a hoax. A few moments later, it was gone from the trending topics. Instead of selling off my investments, I took a moment to check the facts and confirm what was really going on.

While social media is gaining ground as a viable new source for information – I would remind you of something that your father told you many years ago. “Just because it’s on the Internet doesn’t mean that it’s real.” As Twitter and other social networks grow in popularity and usefulness for gathering news and information – it’s also a good time to remember that these things still exist online.

Just be cautious.

When you dial into an audio conference you want to have a smooth and efficient meeting. Few things disrupt meetings like the sound of your co-worker screaming into the Grand Canyon and letting his voice echo back into the call. Okay, so he’s probably not taking the conference call on the Grand Canyon, but his line is definitely causing a bit of echo.

What causes echo and what can you do to fix it?

Make Sure There is Only One Line Connected in a Room – When you have multiple parties in the same room connecting into the same conference, it will create an echo on the conference line. Sound will travel on a delay from your neighbor’s cubicle or desk and into the phone you’re using. Instead of having everyone connect individually, gather the participants in a room and let them dial in together. This will eliminate the conference echo caused by participants in the same room.

Check Your Surroundings – The chance of experiencing an echo is greatly increased when you’re taking your conference call in an enclosed space. The sound of your voice will bounce off of the walls and back into your phone system, and create an echo on your call. When possible, take your conference call in a more open space, like a conference room. If that’s not possible you’ll need to adjust the tone of your voice to try to minimize the impact.

Are You Using a Speakerphone? - Speakerphones are convenient but are one of the biggest culprits when it comes to conference echo. Built in speakers can cause an echo on the conference call. A speaker phone has both a microphone and a speaker built in, so when the volume is up too high, it can cause echoing and distortion. Turn your speakerphone volume down to help with some of this interference.

Speakerphone Bonus: If you’re using a speaker phone to join into the conference and having trouble with the code, mute the device or disable the speaker line to enter the code. This might help your code get recognized.

Conference echo is a nuisance because it immediately disrupts your ability to host an effective meeting. Anytime you have a sound issue on one of your conferences that you can’t figure out, be sure to give customer service a call (800.989.9239) and let us help.

I recently bought a new SUV. It’s a beautiful black Ford Escape, a vehicle I have had my eye on for a long time. One of the most exciting features to me was the “Sync” system where, using my USB device, I can tell my car what to play, instead of having to manually search for songs. Like in the beginning of most relationships, there were some severe communication issues that we had to work through.

Just as I was considering breaking up with Sync, I realized that I had some things I needed to work on, before I called up a couple’s counselor. I learned some things about the way I need to talk to Sync to help her respond better to my needs.

Our biggest communication issues broke down into two categories – my consonants run together and my voice trails off at the end of words. When I would request that Sync play “play artist Tom Petty” she doesn’t hear me clearly. The two “T” sounds become one in the middle of my sentence so she isn’t entirely sure what I meant. The same thing happens where they are “soft” sounds at the end of words. For example, if I request that she plays Adele, she fires back with a bunch of options because the system heard the first part “Ade” but not the rest.

In order to have a good relationship with Sync, I had to change the way I spoke to her. I knew what I was saying, but she wasn’t translating it correctly, and it was causing a rift in our relationship.

Communicate Better with Participants

It’s hard to know when something isn’t communicated effectively to another person since the speaker knows what the intended points are. I knew what I was trying to say to Sync but it was getting lost somewhere along the way. I had to change the way I spoke to her in order to improve our relationship.

You can improve your relationship with your participants by making your entire presentation to a recording device. Then wait a few days and go back and listen to yourself. Make notes about parts of your speech that are fading away or aren’t being translated well.

Letting someone else listen to your presentation is also a great way to understand how a participant might interpret your speech. Take the recording and give it to a friend. Ask them to listen to the entire thing from start to finish and make notes along the way. They can jot down the things that don’t make sense or a misunderstanding that they might come across.

Communication is not just about what you say but how you say it. You can evaluate how to speak before you ever step in front of your audience so that you can know how you will sound and how your words will be received.

Participants have a lot of distractions in front of them when they try to sit down and attend a meeting or web conference. As a speaker, you’re suddenly up against unseen foes of Facebook, Twitter, and email. Most participants will tune in completely to your webinar for the first couple of minutes, but after that, if you do not hold their attention, they will start to drift.

If you don’t want to lose your participants to the weeds of the Internet and other distractions, there are a couple of things you can do during your call to make sure you’re doing what you can to keep their attention.

Pace Yourself.

When you're speaking and presenting on a webinar, you are up against the clock. When presenters are up against the clock one of two things usually happens – they either go through the information entirely too fast, or they get lost in the minutia of their information. Practicing before the event in your allotted time will help you get the right pacing down and make any last minute changes.

Interact with Participants.

During the call, use polls and visuals to keep them engaged. Offer a prize for the best question to the speaker or set up a Twitter hash tag for participants to submit comments and questions about your presentation. If you decide to use Twitter during the conference make sure you have someone manning the account that can respond promptly. You can always go back later and personally respond to your messages, but don’t try to do that while you’re presenting.

Remember the Golden Rule.

Never read directly from your slides or handouts. I’m honestly surprised at how so many speakers continue to make this single mistake when it comes to trying to keep their audience involved in their conferences. Reading word for word from slides is the most direct way to get participants to "check out" of your conference. Why would they need to listen to you when they can just refer back to the copy of the slides? They should be used as a guide and not serve as a script.

Web conferencing technology is here to stay and will no doubt become even more prevalent in your day to day business operations. It’s a good idea to start making these changes to your presentation techniques now so that you’re not behind the curve later.

How do you connect with participants on webinars?

Many moons ago, I worked in direct sales. While it wasn't my favorite job in the world, I learned some valuable skills. The company liked to keep us up to date on new approaches with monthly conference calls, and they were very helpful. When it’s time to set up your next conference call with team members, here are some sales conference topics that you can use.

Success Stories

Each month, invite the “top seller” to make a brief presentation to new hires or those who wish to participate. You can open up for a straight Q&A session to let your new people or the ones that need a little extra motivation find out about what strategies make someone successful in the sales business. A lot of times it helps to simply hear what works for someone else and try to incorporate that into your own approaches.

Skill Refreshers

Once a quarter, set up a conference call with departments or teams that would not usually have direct contact with each other. Use these opportunities to role play situations with a large group and then allow for questions at the end. Ask your employees what was great, what could have gone better, or what needs a little bit of improvement. It’s a great chance to hear new thoughts and approaches from those you wouldn't usually have contact with.

Brainstorm a Better Pitch

The sales persons pitch is the greatest device they have when it comes to closing a deal. If the pitch doesn't resonate, then you've lost your potential client before you even have a chance to start talking about benefits to your product or service. Get your team together on a conference call and start collaborating on a pitch that can be delivered in a clear manner with the same messages delivered across the board. Host a follow up call after a couple of months and find out some of the feedback on the pitch. If it’s still not working – you can attack the pitch again and continue doing so until you find one that works.

Before you start any conference call with your sales team, it’s important to break the ice and start opening up the lines of communication. A good ice breaker planned into the meeting agenda will get people talking and feeling comfortable with each other.

Motivating a sales team doesn't have to be all about money and success. Giving them an open door to get new ideas, stay current, and keep things going helps just as much.

Not long ago, I received a phone call from a customer who was very frustrated that something hadn't gone the way she planned on her conference call. Her participants had been on mute, they were not able to speak, and she could not figure out how the conference had ended up in that setting. As she spoke, I ran through all of the possible things that could have caused the issue. By the time she was done telling me what happened I had a pretty good idea of what caused the issues on her conference call.

That didn't mean that I was about to take over the conversation and tell her exactly what I suspected. I   have a very specific thought process when I'm problem solving with customers and always follow three basic rules.

Remember that the company is guilty until proven innocent. We frequently get calls from customers who have typed in the wrong code. This prevents them from joining their conference and they will call us to see what we can do to help. When we get one of those calls from customers, the first thing we check is within our own system. We check our side to make sure everything is good to go first. This kind of information will help us diagnose the problem the customer is having and we are the cause until we can find out otherwise.

Don't talk down to customers. Once we have determined that everything is okay from our side, it's time to ask the customer some more questions. It's an imperative part of problem solving, but the golden rule here is to not talk down to the customer. When one of our clients is having a problem, it's getting in the way of them conducting business, and they need our help, not a tone that would make a customer feel that I’m secretly saying "I told you so". It’s much more important that we offer solutions to the customer than to prove the customer wrong.

Don't blame the customer. This is a fine line with the customer because you, as the company representative, know that the system wasn't at fault and you're relieved, but it's important to remember that until you hang up the phone, you have to help the customer. It's important that I tell the customer how to prevent the same problem, and not what they should have done to not have a problem in the first place.

Problem solving with a customer can become a he said / she said event if you allow it. I've found that when it comes to a problem, most customers don't want to get upset, they just want you to tell them what is wrong and either fix it – or tell them how to fix it.

How do you approach problem solving with customers?

When you have an operator answered conference call, you will get a line chart that shows you the progression of your attendees at various times.

This data is a compilation of the information that you can collect from the CSV file found on your account after each conference. What we do is plot it along a line graph so that you can see your average call time and your maximum number of users. Charts are much more fun to look at than Excel spreadsheet files.

We want to make sure that you can see how your conference calls work and how your participants are responding. Maybe you are unnecessarily overbooking for your conferences or this data might show you how you can break up your calls and maintain your participant count.

If you receive one of these graphs and have some feedback, we'd love to hear what you think. Is something missing? Maybe we can add data that you would like to see to it. Give us a call at 800.989.9239 to discuss the graph or if you have any other questions.

2012 Cell Phone Statistics

As technology continues to improve, the use and saturation of cell phones and their users continues to change drastically. The increase over the last ten years has been incredible and the way we use our phones to stay connected and informed continues to change.

From Pew Internet

• 87% of American adults on a cell phone, and 45% of those are smart phones.
• Only 12% of adults age 65 and over have a smartphone.
• 82% take pictures on their cell phones, up from 76% in 2010.
• 29% check their bank account online, up from 18% in 2011.
• 9% of adults have texted a charitable organization to make a donation.

CTIA Research Stats

• 45% of businesses state wireless is essential to operations.
• 2.27 trillion text messages were sent.
• 1.1 trillion MB of data was used.
• 28,641 cell phone towers were added across the US.

Mobile Usage Growth

25% of internet users are mobile only - meaning, they do not access the internet for browsing from any other device.

71% of smartphone users that see TV, press, or advertising that interests them will immediately do a mobile search.

The average American smartphone user spent nearly 30 minutes a day checking or updating social networks.

2011 Cell Phone Statistics

The way we use cell phones has changed drastically over the last year. Once upon a time, we used cell phones to make calls while we were away from our homes. Recent studies show that we may be migrating away from our primary use of the phone to more of a texting and mobile web device.

Pew Studies 2011

• 53% of adults own a smartphone.
• 13% of users surveyed pretended to be using their phone in order to avoid social interaction.
• 42% of people have used their phone for entertainment when they are bored.
• 51% of users used their cell phone at least once to get information.
• 27% said they had trouble doing something because they did not have their phone.
• 29% turn off their phones to take a break from their digital life at night.

Updated Statistics for 2009

I was sitting around the other day marveling about how popular cell phones have become. It’s amazing that in our culture we make ourselves available every minute of every day -- thank goodness for call display! Anyway, I did a quick Google search and stumbled upon an interesting article with a list of cell phone statistics that I thought was worth sharing.  

Here’s what I learned:

• Cell Phone usage in the US has increased from 34 million to 203 million in the last ten years
• There is an estimated two billion cell phones world-wide, which means about 4.5 billion people go without.
• A 2004 MIT survey said that cell phones was ranked as the one invention that people hate the most, but can’t live without. It beat out the alarm clock and the television!
• A 2005 University of Michigan study said that 83% said cell phones made life easier (choosing it over the internet).
• A Let’s Talk (retail company) survey said that 38% of people thought it was ok to use a cell phone in the bathroom. (Other stats show cell phone use in restaurants, theaters, supermarkets and subways).
• A telephia survey said that Americans average 13 talking hours a month – with the 18-24 age group averaging 22 hours.
• A Sprint survey said that 2/3 people used their cell phone backlight to find something in the dark.

I wonder how many people would stop blogging to answer their cell phone?

Excuse me, I have call…

5 Ways to cut your cell bill - from ConsumerReports Magazine Jan 2008

Special Caller Deals
Cingular has roll-over minutes.  Most carriers allow free in network calls (like a Verizon to Verizon call).  Alltell and T-Mobile offers a select number of phone numbers which you can call for free.

Overage Charges
During months with higher than normal usage, increase your plan just for that month making sure you don't spend the .45 cents per minute for minutes that are over your plan.  Also make sure to regularly check your bills to determine if you need to increase or decrease your lines.  No sense in paying for more than you need.

Control Usage by Children
AT&T offers a limiting service which controls several aspects of the calling behavior.  From the web parents can limit the phone numbers dialed, duration of calls and more.

Pay Attention to All Charges
Getting a good deal on minutes is good, but make sure you consider all other charges.  Text messaging is a great feature but can add up very quickly.  The standard rate for one text message is 15 cents.  With Texting Plans, messaging can drop to only a penny per message.  Also make sure to check the rates for data and web access.

PrePaid Phone
If you barely use any minutes, and 300 minutes is an overkill for you, then a prepaid phone may be the best option.