For the most part, our users see conference calls as a necessity to any business. They save you from traveling long distances to have meetings and get things done without having to congregate into a large conference room.
However, that doesn't mean there aren't things that people don’t like about conference calls. I did some fun little searches like “I hate conference calls!” and here are some of the things I've found people dislike the most about their conference calls.
- Open conferences with more than 10 people.
- Confusion over “hold” versus “mute” on telephones.
- Conferences that begin or end late.
- Reading directly from presentation slides.
- The sound of someone typing an email (or beating their keyboard with a baseball bat, sometimes it’s hard to tell).
- Intro tones
- Dogs, babies, and the cashier at 7-11.
- Poor sound quality.
- Calls that happen during lunch hours.
- A ten minute conversation about what the conference call will cover.
The good news is that these kinds of things are easily managed within a conference call provider’s features or just by preparing your meetings in advance.
Send out an agenda to set in advance what the call will be about and how long it will take, so that there’s less worry over running over at the end, and eliminate the need to discuss what the call is about.
Use lecture mode with any conferences over ten people. You’d be surprised the difference in the amount of background between five participants and ten. You should also turn off intro tones on calls this large, because nine people coming onto a conference at once is a lot of noise.
For smaller calls, let everyone know they can use *6 to toggle mute on and off for their own line so that background noise is at a minimum. This will also prevent the hold button from being used, which many times will deliver some sweet hold music or even a company announcement into the conference line.
Sound quality can be affected on your conference by a number of things from using a cell phone with a poor connection down to the kind of speaker phone you are using. Using a VoIP phone could be affecting the quality of your connection depending on the kind of service you have.
It’s always a good time to review your conference call etiquette and contact us if you have any questions about feedback, noise, or just want to learn more about what you can do with your conference call.
