Conferencing Archives - NuTech Services LLC

Oct, 2020

Today’s VoIP Platform is Completely Customizable

A business has to have a telephone system. It is the simplest and most utilized method of communication. Many businesses, however, have to consider many variables before choosing theirs and it adds up to a lot of confusion. They need to take into account the cost, yes, but also the feature set, and the phone system’s ability to support much-needed mobility. Today, we will tell you about an option that checks all the boxes: a hosted VoIP system.

What Exactly is Hosted VoiP?

Hosted VoIP is easily described as a communications platform that utilizes an Internet connection to function. Unlike traditional telephone systems that are purchased through the telephone company and have their own dedicated lines, hosted VoIP is hosted in the cloud and allows a business to build a strong, customized telephone system that meets a lot of a company’s communications needs.

While there are VoIP options for consumers, businesses need more. They need more control, more features, and more flexibility. A hosted VoIP platform allows businesses to add and remove lines from their system in minutes and provides them the options to customize the whole system to include more dynamic features designed to maximize a business’ ability to communicate and collaborate efficiently.

The Difference Maker

Most business owners would probably admit to thinking that all telephone systems are the same, but that isn’t the truth. Hosted VoIP can help you control costs, build a more comprehensive communications strategy, and significantly offer solutions to the question of mobility that many businesses have absolutely no answers for. Let’s look at some of the main benefits of hosted VoIP:

Cost

Obviously, for most businesses the cost of a solution has to be a prime consideration. Hosted VoIP can save even the smallest businesses money in multiple ways. First, since you are using your business’ Internet connection to fuel your phone platform, you can cut the telephone company right out of the equation. Secondly, you can customize your hosted VoIP platform to get the solutions that work for your business, presenting you with very little waste. Lastly, your VoIP platform alternatively serves as your business’ mobile platform, as you can use the solution’s mobile app to make and receive phone calls—from your assigned VoIP phone number—anywhere your mobile device has Internet access.

Extremely Simple

A Hosted VoIP platform is extremely simple to set up. Working with a vendor, you can have a telephone system configured the way you like it in about a day. Compare that to the weeks of running cables and moving your business’ around to facilitate the installation of a traditional telephone system. For the end user it is even simpler. All you need to do is hook a VoIP-enabled phone into a workstation and you are ready to go. Additionally, you can add and remove lines extremely quickly, so you aren’t stuck paying for more that you need.

Functionality

One major benefit of VoIP is the customization of the platform. You can literally get dozens of tools if your business needs them. Some of the tools you can get with your VoIP platform include:

Audio and video conferencing
Call forwarding
Personalized extensions
Call routing
Call recording
Automated receptionist
Call queues
Instant messaging
Text messaging
Integrated voicemail

…and there are many more.

Hosted VoIP can change the way your business looks at its communications platform. With reliable and crisp-sounding calls, the Hosted VoIP platform can be right for just about any business. To learn more about hosted VoIP, give us a shout at 810.230.9455 today.

Aug, 2020

Tip of the Week: Three Ways to Improve Remote Meetings

Remote work has certainly shown its utility over the past months, but despite this there are still many businesses who struggle to effectively run remote meetings. As remote meetings aren’t likely to phase out anytime soon, we felt it would be helpful to offer some tips to help make these meetings a little smoother for all involved.

Give Your Team Members Some Responsibilities

An in-person meeting and a meeting through a conferencing solution can admittedly have two very different feelings to the participants. The kind of participation that comes somewhat naturally in an in-person meeting can suddenly feel entirely foreign, the visual context cues that would normally drive the conversation stripped away using technology. As a result, awkward pauses and missed line items abound. This can easily lead to people increasingly talking out of turn, while others will remain silent. One way to help mitigate this is by distributing an agenda with assigned segments beforehand. That way, each team member will be responsible for some facet of the meeting, with the bonus of being able to prepare ahead of time to increase the meeting’s benefit.

This isn’t the only way you can keep your team members involved, either. You could also assign tasks for people to take notes or to keep track of the time remaining in the meeting. As a result, the whole team stays engaged in the meeting, and therefore will be more apt to contribute to the discussion.

Don’t Overfill Your Meetings

Have you ever sat in one of those meetings where the group was so big you felt as though you couldn’t get a word in edgewise, and that even if you did, only half the group would pick up on the point you made? An overly large remote meeting can work the same way. Lagging technology and people fighting for the chance to speak can make conversations difficult, and the increased background noise could easily drown out any productive conversation.

Therefore, smaller remote meetings are invariably better, as a more natural conversation can quickly take over and there is a reduced chance of distracting background noise. As a bonus, the smaller meeting size means that each person has a chance to contribute proportionally more to the meeting, increasing their engagement with it.

Don’t Allow People to Mute Themselves

Having people mute themselves during a remote meeting is like having a mime join a choir—there’s very little that they are going to contribute.

In addition to preventing people from contributing (potentially sacrificing valuable ideas), muting could also allow people to dissociate from the meeting completely. If they’re muted, one of your participants could be listening to a podcast, for all you know. If anything, allow brief muting to help hide noisy interruptions, like a sneeze or an unaware family member, but that’s it.

What have you done to keep your meetings running smoothly? Share your strategies with us by putting them in the comments!

May, 2017

Webinars Take the Excuses Out of Missing Meetings

For today’s businesses, displaying your organizational authority is crucial to success. Whether it’s McDonald’s with fast food burgers, Chevrolet with cars and trucks, or Walmart for everything else, the message you put out there is seemingly as important as the services you provide. For small businesses, this becomes even more crucial. For example, if you run a hardware store, you likely can’t compete with the prices of the big box stores, but you can bring to the table something of greater value to the consumer: your knowledge.

In the past, companies would have seminars to introduce new concepts to anyone that had a vested interest, or to present their consumer base a new set of practices. These seminars were great marketing tools for companies to show the consumer that they, in fact, know about the products or services they were selling. As a result, they were great ways to build organic traffic into their stores. This is a classic example of how word of mouth is the best form of marketing.

Cut to today, people are busy, and with social media being what it is, it was inevitable that companies would have to start coming to the consumer, rather than having the consumer come to them. Nowadays, the webinar (obviously taken from the root words web and seminar) has allowed the modern business to interact with would-be customers over the Internet. The webinar is set up much like the seminar with a presentation or course followed by a full question and answers section.

A webinar can be an hour or two, it can be a half-hour, it can be five. There really isn’t any set amount of time, but you have to remember that even if you are constantly at the computer, some of the people you are trying to reach aren’t. Also, no matter how valuable you think the information you have packed into your five-hour webinar is, it doesn’t take much for people, interested or not, to be distracted away from what you are saying. In fact, that brings up one of the main benefits of the webinar, the ability for the user to listen at their leisure. So while you may hold an event at 7 PM on a Wednesday, you can distribute the webinar for anyone to download or stream for as long as you’d like. It’s best practice to keep it between one and two hours, and don’t waste your listener’s time with fluff. If someone gets bored with one of your webinars, the chances decrease substantially that they will ever go to another.

Along with their platform for distributing your company’s knowledge and authority in your industry, webinars have shown to be one of the best ways to close new customers. In fact, Buzzsumo has stated that nearly one-fifth of their webinar attendees turn into paying customers.

The technology used to conduct a webinar is readily available. There are literally dozens of free and paid applications designed to let you conduct webinars. Some of these include GoToWebinar, AnyMeeting, Google Hangouts, and Microsoft’s Skype platform. If you are curious about what it takes for you to educate potential and current customers with a webinar, contact NuTech Services’s professional IT staff at 810.230.9455.