How to Act on a Professional Conference Call

A professional conference call should be the litmus test for all conference calls. When would a person not want to appear professional with their employers or prospective employers? No matter your situation with the other people on the phone, we can assist you with appearing professional and keep you from committing career suicide.

The first lesson is to test out your new headset before attempting to do a conference call. There is nothing more annoying than a person breathing heavily into the microphone, sounding as though they are stalking all the other callers. A professional conference call should attempt to be courteous, respectful, and informative. If you drop your headset and everyone hears the clattering then it is disrespectful and makes you look like a fool. Test out the headgear, make sure you sound clear through the phone, and learn all the other buttons on the headset.

This brings us to our other point, many conference callers try to multi-task while on the conference call. A professional conference call should be done with attention and poise, making you ready to leap with a response or suggestion. Digging around under your desk for the pen you lost last week can not only distract you from the conversation but could cause you to miss a valuable opportunity. A professional conference call should give you a good idea of your communication skills. However, if you are talking to the sandwich delivery guy, thinking you have the headset on mute, then others will know how much or how little you paid for lunch. Be sure you know what is mute and what is not.

If you use a speaker phone for a professional conference call, know that others can hear even the littlest of sounds. The tapping of a loud keyboard can resound to the ears of your project manager and cause annoyance. Be sure to have a pad of paper and pen to take notes. Also, be sure to turn your cell phone to vibrate. You do not want the latest ring tone bellowing out for the rest of the conference call to hear. By being professional, you think about the little things that would annoy you on the other end of a phone, and make sure you do not do those things.

A professional conference call propels your image to others on the call, causing them to see you in a different light. We only have our voices and our behavior on calls such as this, so we want to accentuate our wise ideas and take away from any annoying habits or circumstances. For this reason, we practice with our new headset, understand its functionality, and know what we are doing when on a speaker phone. With these simple precautions, a professional conference call will cast you in a positive light.

Toll Free Conference Calls

Conference calls are a convenient method of communicating with a lot of people all at once. Technologies today allow many different types of conference calling.

For a small business, simple 3-way calling may suffice. This feature is available through your telephone company and whatever long-distance rates you have on the phone that originates the call will apply.

When several people located in many different places need to access conference calls, a conference call company can provide this service.

A basic conference call service offers audio conference calls (also called teleconferencing) over the telephone. Usually, you have the option of toll-free calls or flat-rate calls.

“Toll-free” is sort of a misnomer because “toll-free” does not mean it’s entirely a free call because the person or business that hires the conference call company pays for the service.

Toll-free conference calls are free for the participants. With toll-free packages, participants use a toll-free number to dial into the call via the conference call company.

The charges for the calls are usually by the minute for the length of the call. In many cases, the more minutes used, the less money per minute it costs. For instance, one package may offer 1,000 toll-free minutes for $70 or 7 cents a minute. If you go over 1,000 minutes, each additional minute would cost 7 cents. Another package may offer 10,000 minutes for $400 or 4 cents a minute and 4 cents for each minute over 10,000 minutes. You can see the cost goes down with the larger packages.

A flat-rate conference call package requires the participants to pay their own long-distance charges. They dial a regular phone number to access the call via the conference call company. The company who hires the conference call company also pays a flat fee to set up the service.

The conference call companies always offer features that augment their basic service. For example, you can have the conference call company record your conference calls and then provide a playback. The playbacks can even be on-demand so people can hear them at any time 24/7.

As you might imagine, conducting a live conference call with dozens of people on the line at once could get a bit out of hand with everyone talking at once and noise in the background as well. Technology comes to the rescue with mute buttons that allow the moderator and/or operator to control what is broadcast on the call.

The operators at the teleconferencing companies can assist you in many ways. In addition to connecting participants as they call in to access your conference, operators can even call participants and then connect them to your call. Operators can attend the entire conference call, providing opening announcements, introductions for host and speakers, moderating question and answer sessions and making closing comments at the end of the call.

Audio conference calls are not the only options available to you. Web conferencing is another type of conference call that utilizes access through participants’ computers. Participants are able to view PowerPoint and whiteboard presentations and to share documents. Communication among participants can be audio or via chat formats. Upgrades of web conferencing services include application and desktop sharing, remote control and video conferencing.

As you can see, there are many ways that businesses today can communicate effectively via conference calling. There are lots of conference-calling companies to choose from and the competition among them drives good bargains for business owners who will take the time to do a little research to find the best bargains.