Conference Calling Software

Every business meeting is an expense. In fact, a one-hour meeting among three employees with an average annual income of $50,000 costs your small business approximately $105. In order to minimize this expense, you need to conduct your business meetings as efficiently as possible so that you are able to save a maximum amount of time.

One way to do this is to use conference calling software. The software helps you:

• Allow attendees to connect to a call using smartphones
• Save time and money, as attendees will not need to travel to the meeting location
• Conduct web conferences with clients and remote employees

By using a conference calling solution, you'll be able to conduct your business meetings more efficiently. This will ultimately result in streamlined processes and higher business profits.

To help you select the right software for your business, we've included the necessary information related to conference calling software market in this guide.

Here's what we'll cover:

What Is Conference Calling Software?
Common Features of Conference Calling Software
What Type of Buyer Are You?
Benefits and Potential Issues
Market Trends to Understand

What Is Conference Calling Software?

Conference calling software helps businesses set up audio, video and web conference calls with employees and customers. The software helps users perform the following functions:

• Manage a secure connection between host and attendees within a video and audio conference.
• Create online events and manage the registration process.
• Collaborate with multiple hosts and attendees via live chat, Q&A and live polling options.
• Provide customers, clients and attendees with a web conference portal to join calls.
• Provide customers and employees with custom URLs and credentials for joining web conferences.

Common Features of Conference Calling Software

The first step towards selecting the right conference calling solution is to understand the software features. Having the right set of conference calling software features will help you maximize the ROI on your software purchase since you won't need to purchase other solutions to make up for a lack of features.

In this section, we'll list the most important conferencing software features that you must check out while searching a conference calling solution:

Screen sharing	Lets you share your desktop screen and presentations with the participants in the call.
Multiple hosts	Allows multiple participants to host a conference meeting. Organizers can decide different hosts for the different sections of the meeting and transfer audio and screen-sharing controls accordingly.
Live chat	Enables collaboration between organizers and attendees via a live chat section on the screen.
Polls/voting	Conduct in-call and post-call surveys to capture participants' opinions.
Reporting and analytics	Provides you with reports on conference calls. The reports include parameters such as conference duration and the number of participants.
Mobile app	Lets users join conference calls from their smartphones.
Dial-in number	Allow participants to join a conference by dialing a specific phone number. Users can also set conference codes that attendees can use to connect to the call.

Reporting in Zoho Showtime

What Type of Buyer Are You?

The next step towards selecting your conference calling solution is to understand the types of buyers in the market. With this knowledge, you'll make an informed software purchase decision to fit your buyer type.

In this section, we've classified the conference calling software buyers into two broad categories:

Audio conferencing software buyers. These buyers look for a voice calling software with conference calling functionality. If you own a small business that has a single-location office or that does not need video conferencing functionality, you should invest in this type of software solution.

Audio and video conferencing software buyers. These buyers usually belong to businesses that have multi-location offices or that need a lot of collaboration with external stakeholders and clients. Businesses that work with freelancers or need to provide product demonstrations can also invest in these solutions.

Benefits and Potential Issues

If your business conducts a lot of web conferences, webinars or online events, a conference calling solution will help you organize them more efficiently. Following are the key benefits of conference calling software:

Reduced costs. Since conference calling software allows users to access calls via the internet, it provides a cost advantage when compared to conducting the same number of calls via mobile and landline networks.

Higher attendance. Conference calling software lets users join calls via multiple options—desktop application, cloud application, mobile app and dial-in numbers. Also, with attendance tracking, organizers can track the applicants that are present in a call. These result in improved attendance in your business meetings.

Improved collaboration in meetings. A conference calling solution provides you with multiple features to improve collaboration in meetings. Users can select multiple hosts to present different sections of the meeting. The screen sharing functionality allows hosts to share presentations with all the participants, and the live chat and poll options improve engagement between the participants.

However, despite these advantages, there are some issues that may arise if you are not careful while selecting or using conference calling software. Below are some common issues that the users of conference calling software face:

Dependence on the internet. If you use a cloud-based solution, this will be one of your biggest challenges. If the internet speed is not good, it will affect the quality of your audio and video calls. This is an even bigger issue if a lot of your employees join conference calls from their smartphones. Cloud-based conference calling software users can minimize this risk by selecting a product with dial-in functionality. This way, attendees will be able to dial-in from their smartphones and connect to the call when the internet connection is poor.

Website downtime and network-equipment failure. This issue affects both cloud-based and on-premise software users. Equipment failures and vendor maintenance affect the availability of conference calling software until the issues are fully resolved. For this reason, buyers looking for cloud-based conference calling solutions should select a vendor that offers low downtime in its service level agreement (SLA). If systems are down, attendees may also need to connect via telephonic conference calls while the maintenance is being carried out.

Unauthorized access and other data security breaches. Since conference calls are hosted via the internet or physical servers, there is a risk of unauthorized access and call interception. To combat this risk, conference calling software buyers should make sure that the product they shortlist has the necessary security protocols, such as HIPAA, 56-bit DES encryption and 128-bit AES encryption.

Market Trends to Understand

Based on our research, following are the key trends in the conference calling software market:

Virtual reality is the future of web conferences. Virtual reality can provide users with an enhanced meeting experience. With the help of this technology, attendees will be able to convey their opinions and gestures more efficiently, making the conference calls more effective and engaging. We expect virtual reality to become a core conference calling functionality by 2025.

AI and natural language processing (NLP) to take meeting notes. AI and NLP can help businesses make their note-taking process more efficient. While NLP can transcribe calls to text, AI can sift through the transcripts to find relevant items and summarize meetings. With products such as Wrapup and Hendrix already making developments in this area, we can expect the technology to expand into conference calling software by 2022.