Meeting Software

Software Applications for Meeting

Collaboration is a key to a successful business, whether small or large, as it helps with problem-solving, teamwork, and client management. With remote working on the rise, it has become more crucial for businesses to manage workplace collaboration effectively.

Meeting software enables and enhances communication within businesses. Communication can be through text, audio, video, and content sharing. While collaboration is the basic requirement, security, ease of use, and scalability are additional benefits provided by this software.

In this buyers guide, we’ll look at common features, benefits, and key considerations before purchasing meeting software.

Here’s what we'll cover:

• What is meeting software?
• Common features of meeting software
• What type of buyer are you?
• Benefits of meeting software
• Market trends

What is meeting software?

Meeting software streamlines organizing, scheduling, conducting, and attending meetings. These meetings can be team meets, training sessions, webinars, presentations, and interviews. With the dynamic need for this technology, meeting software applications offer features that suit a particular meeting type or multiple use cases.

The meeting management software increases engagement between teammates, departments, and business partners. The web conferencing solution is cost-effective, sustainable and saves time as it reduces travel and expenses incurred for in-person meetings.

Common features of meeting software

The contemporary workplace has required online communication to become more significant than ever due to employees working remotely and across geographical locations, and outsourcing work to freelancers. Meeting software has evolved to meet the communication requirements.

Take a look at the common features that a web conferencing software solution includes:

What type of buyer are you?

Before deciding on which software to choose from, you should understand which buyer category you belong to so that you choose the right software. Most buyers belong to one of the following categories:

• Small and midsize enterprises (up to 500 employees): Whether you are in legal, marketing, education, fitness, medical or any other industry, you are required to communicate with your clients and customers. As social gatherings continue to move to hybrid and remote models, you need to make online sessions more lively, accessible, and interactive. Thus, buyers in this category should look for software solutions that provide creative backgrounds, reactions, hand raising, mobile device integration and live chat options.
  Businesses who are in education should opt for a collaboration tool that enables students to move beyond classroom walls by connecting with relevant people, places, and events. Meetings hosts have controls to disable chat options, mute and remove participants to manage virtual classrooms. Sessions can be pre-recorded so that participants can watch them at a later time or refer back to for future references.
• Large enterprises (over 500 employees): These buyers need conferencing solutions to communicate with teammates, departments, business partners, and clients. Government agencies, public sector institutions, hospitals and private enterprises fall under this category. Beyond collaboration, these buyers are looking for tools that are secure with end to end encryption, enable integrations with their industry-specific devices, CRM, marketing and sales tools, support webcasts at massive scales, and provide real-time translations for diverse audiences.

Benefits of meeting software

The key benefits of meeting software include:

• Unified communication: As employees use multiple communication methods such as chat, phone calls, video conferencing, etc., meeting software streamlines communication by offering multiple channels in one platform.
• Lower costs: If your employees live in different countries or cities, bringing them together for a team meeting takes a toll on your budget. Meeting software allows employees to communicate from anywhere at any time. Thus, saving valuable time and money. Web conferencing software has also reduced the need for establishing board meeting rooms. These conference rooms require expensive equipment and have limited seating. With video conferencing software, the applications are installed in every system and reduces the need to buy additional equipment.
• Productive meetings: Since meetings are planned in advance, you can create agendas beforehand. The sessions are more likely to be productive as participants adhere to the agendas without spending time on idle conversations.
• Ease of measuring results: Virtual meeting software provides insights into important aspects of meeting data such as cost, attendance, duration, engagement, and feedback from participants. These reports help you in analyzing which meetings were most productive, allowing you to adopt best practices for future meetings.
• Maintain records: Meeting software enables organizers to record sessions, and maintain transcripts. With recorded meetings, non-attendees do not miss out on discussions and visuals. These logs can also be used for future references.

Market trends:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) can help make meeting software more interactive: With AI-driven technology, meeting software enhances the way people communicate by adding more human elements. This software is capable of adjusting the position of your eye, therefore, it seems like you are looking straight at the other person. The continuous learning capability of meeting software makes it easier to conduct virtual meetings with low-speed internet as well. The software collects key points from a person’s facial muscles and creates a realistic video with low bandwidth data. AI-driven meeting tools bring more inclusion through real-time translations within assemblies.

Note: The application selected in this article is an example to show a feature in context and is not intended as an endorsement or a recommendation. It has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.