Get Face-to-Face
Video conferencing is a great tool to help boost the return on investment (ROI) in your communications system. Benefits include saving time, resources, and money because you connect face-to-face online without having to leave the office. It is versatile, easy-to-use, and functional. Reduced travel expense has often been touted as the major factor in decisions to invest in video conferencing systems. It costs a lot of money and a lot of time to travel to meet people. Imagine that you have to conduct an important meeting for your company with different people who are dispersed over different places in the world, thousands of miles apart. To bring them together around a table, you need to consider and deal with so many hassles: travel expenses, availability of flight seats, visas, availability of participants at the scheduled time, accommodation, food etc.
On the other hand, some say video conferencing can actually be more efficient than regular face-to-face conferences since the meetings often have a defined start and end time with people calling in from different locations, so a more focused discussion and less chitchat is likely. And, the organizing can be done over email or instant messaging.
Since most communication is nonverbal, video conferencing fills a huge gap that has long existed within organizations using audio alone. A video conference helps managers, knowledge workers, salespeople, and customer-service employees to better convey and understand information that is being shared within projects or engagements.
As sales involves collaboration with customers and a sales team, you can employ video conferencing to support sales activities such as sales presentations, training sessions, and hosting product demos.
Video conferencing has been used to train sales people, interface with customers and close business more quickly. One financial services firm deployed video conferencing to allow their subject matter expert to be in more places more quickly. In the past, he had to travel to each site, make a presentation and then fly home. With video conferencing, he is able to connect more sites together at the same time. This gets his information out more quickly to more people. As a result, revenue has grown and the salesperson has less wear and tear on his body. He stated, “Before video conferencing, I was exhausted. Now I travel less, see more people and close business more quickly.” ~ S. Ann Earon, Ph.D. President, Telemanagement Resources International Inc.
Businesses today are transforming the way company-wide training is conducted. Company personnel are no longer required to leave the comfort of their homes and offices. By introducing online training through video conferencing, not only are businesses able to drastically reduce the cost of travel but they also see an increase in employee productivity and job satisfaction.
Mobile video conferencing is the future, and it’s advancing at a tremendous rate. Most video conference systems now enable the use of mobile devices for participating in a video conference, you can have effective visual communication without restrictions on time or place. You can join a video conference from a location outside of the office, while you are on the go, or from your own home using a mobile device. There’s a world of opportunity waiting for you; all you have to do is explore it!
The growing trend to use video calls will continue to change how people interact with one another and overcome some of the past reluctance to choose video conferencing. Today’s youth expect video as an almost default collaboration tool. In a survey by Redshift Research, 75 percent of the young professional respondents say they will not settle for low quality. This expectation results from growing up with technology that continues to improve rapidly.