Conference calling is an essential business tool for organizations – and has been for decades. The telephone is one of those technologies that not only revolutionized private life in developed countries when it was introduced well over one hundred years ago, it completely transformed how business was conducted, as well.

With the abrupt rise in the importance of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the 1990s, savvy technology companies and software developers found ways to harness the increasingly-accessible infrastructure of the Internet for use in business communications. Suddenly, the old standard of the telephone had a new, complementary technology that could do things that telephone users could only dream of.

If you are looking into conference calling company options for your organization, here are 5 reasons to consider the additional of web conferencing to your company’s business toolbox:

1. Web conferencing can cut down on voice communications costs with VoIP:

Even if you are purely interested in voice-only communications, investing in a web-based conferencing system may still be the most economical thing to do. With something called VoIP (voice over IP), the Internet’s infrastructure can be leveraged as a way to communicate with voice by converting sound into data packets. These packets are then exchanged over the Internet just like traditional data for files, images, or streaming media. With VoIP, you can greatly cut down on your organization’s use of the traditional telephone – and telephone costs.

2. Offers many additional communication dimensions:

Whereas with telephone conference calling users are limited strictly to the dimension of voice, web conferencing expands your communication dimensions to include video (images of faces and rooms, for example), streaming media, whiteboards, and text chatting. In addition, forms of attendee feedback such as polling and voting are made possible with most web conferencing systems.

3. Gives you the opportunity to record, archive and review meetings:

With web conferencing, you can actually have the system record every aspect – voice, video, shared applications, text messages – of the meeting. The data can be archived and then reviewed at a later time for further study or for auditing purposes.

4. Provides a written record of many aspects of a meeting for later analysis:

The ability to exchange not only sound and images – which are very time-consuming to review after a meeting – is greatly augmented in those web conferencing systems that allow for the exchange of text-based chat. Unlike voice and video, text chat can be mined automatically later to detect meaningful patterns – or just to find out who said what in an unequivocal way. Bottom line: web conferencing offers text chat options – and text is faster to analyze later.

5. Offers increased ability for meeting security:

As compared to voice-only technologies, web-based conferencing solutions with voice features offer excellent opportunities for additional meeting security. Depending upon the web conferencing solution your organization selects, you can choose from a variety of security-related features including data encryption, user authentication, and in-house administrative capabilities. Also, these systems offer a range of possible implementation configurations, including web applications, remote hosting, and local hosting.

If your organization is looking at a conference calling company for your conferences, meetings and seminars, consider a web-based conferencing solution instead or in addition to a phone-only system.

Author Bio: Compare live web conferencing solutions at: Live Web Conferencing Advisor.

Category: Business Management
Keywords: Conference Call Service Provider ,7 Types of Web Conferencing Systems