Video conferencing 101

Supercharge your meetings with video conferencing

Meetings are meant to be an engine of productivity in the workplace. But what’s meant to be an efficient way for people to get together to discuss ideas, debate issues, overcome obstacles, and drive outcomes, often doesn’t turn out that way. In fact, most meetings are often a waste of time. Here’s the ugly truth about meeting effectiveness.

More than$37 billion
per year is spent on

unproductive meetings
25 millionmeetings per day
in the US
15%
of an organization’s collective

time is spent in meetings
67%of meetings are failures
4 hours
a week preparing for status

update meetings

Video conferencing solves your meeting problems

In addition to these all-too-human reasons meetings are less than efficient and productive, there are also lots of logistical reasons meetings just don’t work (you are probably all too familiar with some of these issues):

Remote participants – coworkers
vendors, and clients
Multiple time zones
The time and cost
associated with travel
A lack of practical, easy-to-
implement online meeting solutions

Today’s work environment is marked by constant change and lots of variability.

While it’s an exciting time for innovators and results-oriented performers, all of this change and variability puts strain and pressure on your ability to perform and communicate across teams and with clients and vendors.

Video conferencing software solutions, coupled with video conferencing software providers who deliver high quality, reliable products and excellent customer service, help businesses like yours be the best they can be.

How does video conferencing help businesses like yours?

The upside to the rapid change and variability is that technology providers like Vision Voice are constantly improving video conferencing in the workplace.

It’s becoming easier to visually connect and share information with people inside and outside of your organization, or across the world, with easy-to-use video conferencing software that works reliably across devices, and meeting rooms.

How video conferencing supercharges your meetings

The latest iterations of video conferencing software solve many of the problems facing knwoledge workers like you.
With video conferencing you:

Save Money

When working internationally, the cost of travel is a huge issue. Video conferencing eliminates the costs of airfare, hotels, meals, and other incidental expenses while providing a format that enhances relationships, allowing people to experience nonverbal communication and encouraging employee engagement (afterall, they’re on camera!).

In addition to travel, video conferencing can help reduce costs by better leveraging people and resources across locations, by recording interactive training for repeat use, and bringing expertise wherever it is needed to help reduce costly mistakes, like in product design and manufacturing.

A benefit of new cloud-based services is that high-quality video conferencing is now affordable, requires less IT resources to set up and manage, and doesn’t require a huge capital investment.

Help the Environment

Here’s something that people don’t always consider: While video conferencing saves time and money and improves productivity and relationships, it’s also spares the environment. Everytime you avoid getting into a car or hopping on a plane, it cuts your personal carbon footprint.

Video conferencing at its best is an amazing tool that helps you enjoy your work more by being better connected to your peers and enhancing your productivity, while also providing unexpected benefits like protecting our planet’s natural resources.

There are a lots of video conferencing options to chose from, which brings us to the all-important question of how to select the best video conferencing software for you and your business needs.

Save Time

It’s not just the cost associated with travel, but also the time. Video conferencing saves time in many other ways as well, allowing staff to work more efficiently and make important decisions faster.

Bringing cross-functional teams together to make decisions can accelerate time to market for new products and services, evaluate and repair equipment in the field faster.

Create Excellent Customer Experiences

Video conferencing is great for staff, but can equally powerful for improving customer satisfaction. Rallying virtual teams around a customer issue can drive faster resolution, improve loyalty and reduce churn. Consider scheduling regular customer check-ins via video conference to improve relationships;

The possibilities are limited only by your imagination.

Increase Productivity

Because video conferencing brings people together no matter where they are, productivity increases.

Video conferencing also enhances a sense of team and helps break down worker silos and that discouraging sense being “on your own” so many remote employees feel today.

Enhance Efficiency

Multitasking has proven repercussions on business, costing the global economy $450 billion annually. Video conferencing can help decrease multitasking by encouraging people to focus on the discussion at hand.

More focused and engaged workers deliver higher productivity, and the companies they work for have greater profitability and less employee turnover.

Hire the Best Talent

High-quality video conferencing software allows you to be more flexible in your hiring, getting the best talent from anywhere and enabling remote work initiatives without compromising quality.

Virtual interviews via video conferencing give you and the candidate greater flexibility and allow more people from various locations to be involved in early screenings to make faster and more informed decisions.

Enhance Relationships

In business, nothing is more important than relationships. Video conferencing fosters relationships with partners, collaborators, vendors, and of course clients, because you can create high quality, engaging meetings anytime, anywhere.

Six things to Consider When Choosing Video Conferencing Software

For decades, video conferencing has promised to change the way you work, but the technologies have been difficult and expensive to set up and use, often requiring you to move to a special room, and were disconnected from other tools you use in your daily routine.

Here are 6 important points to consider :

Video and Web conferencing that converge in the cloud

A common complaint today is that people need too many different applications to get work done. The latest video conferencing technology is cloud based, combining with web conferencing to provide one flexible tool for its users. According to industry research firm Aragon Research:“Major disruption is coming from a combination of cloud and real-time collaboration on mobile devices. This disruption is giving way to smaller, more flexible providers, such as Vision Voice, that can deliver web and video conferencing capabilities from the cloud to any device or conference room set-up at a fraction of the cost of a traditional room-based system. This changing dynamic completes with traditional on-premises and hardware-based delivery models.”– Aragon Research –

As cloud computing becomes more common and small businesses have increasing access to all that the cloud offers,think about how staying on top of technology will help your company with employee satisfaction, workflow, and sales.

Security, reliability, and control for IT

While it’s important to satisfy the end user, IT staff still needed tools that deliver centralized provisioning, management and analytics, as well as a reliable global service architecture and business-grade security. Top video conferencing software meets IT’s needs and helps business owners feel confident knowing that their information is encrypted both in flight and at rest.

Companies like Vision Voice invest in security using enterprise certifications such as SOC-II, FIPS 140-2 and US/EU Safe Harbor compliance. Vision Voice has also received third party HIPAA Attestation for compliant use in healthcare applications. To find out more about these specialized features, contact us.

Consistent, high-quality voice, video and content experience across devices

When choosing video conferencing software, look for consistent, high-quality, video and content experience across devices, so you can connect anywhere with the device in hand or the screen in the room.

Integration with the applications you are already using

You are more likely to use collaboration tools if they fit naturally into your daily workflow. Choose a solution that moves with you and can connect to the applications you already use like Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Box, Dropbox, etc…

Cost

Choose a video conferencing provider that allows a free trial for distributed teams. You’ll find out how well the application performs and how responsive the platform’s team is, and get all your questions answered. A free trial allows you to get comfortable with the software before implementing it organization-wide.

Usability for staff

A major shift is happening in how business software is designed. Taking lessons from the consumer world, enterprise software is now being designed for the actual users, instead of IT using behavioral data to constantly improve the experience. It sounds simple, but it can make a huge difference in the usability of a tool like video conferencing. Many companies are “hands on” with their devices, so it’s more important than ever that video conferencing software prioritizes simplicity and usability.