How To Choose A Conferencing Provider

How To Choose A Conferencing Provider
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When choosing a web conferencing provider, you’re not just looking for a tool; you’re looking
for a communications partner. Fortunately, there are dozens of web conferencing providers and
services to choose from. You just need to find it. Here’s a road map to help get you there.
You’ve made the decision that your business needs web
conferencing. Travel costs are killing you. You need better
collaboration with your developers in Asia and better
communication with your sales team across the U.S.
Marketing wants to start doing web seminars to generate
more leads for the sales team. Customer Support wants to
deliver more effective training to more customers. And it
would be nice to let people work from home now and then
without missing important meetings.
Identify Your Needs
The starting point in choosing a web conferencing
provider is to determine how you will use it:
•
Will you be holding scheduled or on-demand
Web Meetings where the number of participants is
limited but they need to interact freely?
•
Will you be conducting Webinars where you’re
delivering a presentation or demo to an invited
audience while addressing their questions and
comments?
•
Will you be Webcasting – broadcasting your
content over the Internet to a general audience?
•
Will you be doing On-line Collaboration where
the participants may need to share and control each
other’s desktop applications?
You may do some or all of these, but try to determine how
you will use it the most so that you end up with a service
and provider best suited to your needs. Keep in mind
that how you use web conferencing will likely grow and
change over time.
Estimate the typical number of participants you expect for
each of the various ways you plan to use web conferencing.
Will the participants be employees, or external
participants such as customers or prospects? Where will
they be located? Will any of them be participating from
international locations?
Finally, who will be using the web conferencing service?
Is the service just for your department or for your entire
company? If you can, collect input from everyone who will
be using the service so you can make the best decision on
a provider. You may find out that you need more than one
service or provider to meet everyone’s needs.
.
Feature Sets
Once you know what you’ll be using web conferencing
for, you can decide what features you need. For example,
if you’re going to hold web seminars, do you want the
conferencing service to include event scheduling and
registration capabilities? If you’re going to use it for
training, do you want to be able to record the training
sessions for later use?
A majority of web conferencing providers offer the same
basic set of commonly-used features. Some features may
be priced separately, so it is important to know what you
need versus what you want before you start evaluating
web conferencing providers.
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Purchase Priorities
Before you can begin evaluating web conferencing services and providers, you should understand your purchasing priorities.
A web conferencing service may have all the features you need, but be priced beyond your budget. Or, you may be willing
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sacrifice
some functionality for ease-of-use. Knowing your purchasing priorities will help focus your evaluation of web
conferencing services and providers on what’s most important to your business.
Here are some purchasing criteria and questions for you to consider:
Feature
Ask Yourself
Ask Provider
Price
What is your budget and
what are your ROI targets?
Quality
Based on your typical use
scenario, how sensitive
are you to the quality of
the web conferencing
service?
How fast is the response time? How clear is the audio? How often
are calls dropped? Are there redundant servers? How robust is the
software?
Ease of Use
Who will be using web
conferencing and what is
their level of expertise?
Does the web conferencing service require you or your meeting
participants to download, install, and maintain software? Is the user
interface intuitive and easy to follow?
Feature Set
What are your “must have”
features and which ones
can you live without?
Are the features you need well-designed and easy to use? Do any of the
features cost extra?
Customer
Support
What kind of customer
support do you need and
are you willing to pay extra
for it? Do you expect it
24/7/365? Will you want
training?
Who provides the customer support – the provider or a 3rd party?
Are live operators always available? Does the provider offer meeting
planning and operator-assisted services? Is training available and is
it free?
Security &
Scalability
How do you expect your
web conferencing needs
to grow or change? What
type of security do you
need?
Can the web conferencing service grow to meet the future needs of your
business? Are there services available for different size businesses?
How does the web conferencing service work with company firewalls?
Are web meetings passcode protected? Does the provider use data
encryption?
How much does the web conferencing service cost? What is included
in this price? Are any of the features you need priced separately?
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Understand the Pricing
When you buy web conferencing, you’re actually paying for a
service, similar to your cell phone service. Web conferencing
providers offer pricing plans. The three most common plans
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are:
1. Per Minute. Also know as “on-demand” or “pay-per-use”
plans, you simply pay for the minutes you use.
2. Subscription. Also know as “flat-rate” plans, you pay a
monthly or yearly fee per “seat” or “user” to hold unlimited
meetings up to a maximum number of participants per
seat.
3. Enterprise Licenses. Many providers offer corporate
licenses so that everyone in your organization can hold
unlimited web conferences at a fixed price.
For most businesses, subscription pricing is the best
alternative. Subscription plans vary widely among providers,
so it’s important to understand your typical usage pattern so
your can analyze these plans and see which ones are the most
cost-effective. It’s also important to know which features you
need in case providers charge extra for some of them.
Although web conferencing providers’ pricing options may
appear straightforward, applying them to your situation
can produce surprising results. For example, consider
the following example of a medium-sized company’s web
conferencing needs:
• 5 departments, each needs a separate web conferencing
subscription.
• Each department holds an average of 3 one-hour
meetings per week which is 780 meetings in a year
between the five departments.
• Each meeting has up to 10 participants.
• The Marketing department additionally plans to
conduct one 1-hour web seminar each month for up to
50 participants.
• The Training/Support department additionally plans to
provide two 1-hour web training classes per week for up
to 25 students.
Provider A charges the following:
• $0.06/minute based on a pay-per-use plan.
• $39.00/month per seat for up to 15 participants based
on an annual subscription plan.
• $0.12/minute for each additional participant over 15.
The annual cost of a pay-per-use plan from Provider A is:
#
Min. Parts
$
Cost
Meetings 780
60
10
$.06
$28,080
Webinars 12
60
50
$.06
$2160
60
25
$.06
$9360
Total
$39,600
Training 104
The annual cost of a subscription plan from Provider A is:
#
Min.
Subscription
Meetings 780
Seats
$
15
$39.00
Cost
60
5 Subs
$2340
12
60
35
$.12
$3024
Training 104
60
10
$.12
$7488
Total
$12,852
Overage
Webinars
Clearly, a subscription plan from Provider A is more costeffective for this company than a pay-per-use plan even though
the per-minute rate seems very reasonable.
Now consider Provider B, who charges the following:
• $59.00/month per seat for up to 25 participants based on
an annual subscription plan.
• $0.20/minute for each additional participant over 25.
The annual cost of a subscription plan from Provider B is:
#
Min.
Subscription
Meetings 780
Seats
$
15
$59.00
Cost
$3540
60
5 Subs
$2340
12
60
25
$.20
$3600
Training 104
60
0
$.20
$0
Total
$7140
Overage
Webinars
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Even though Provider B’s subscription and per minute prices
are significantly higher than Provider A, the annual cost is
much less for this company due to the higher participant
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limit.
Watch free demos. Take advantage of free demos from
the providers to get a good overview of their service. If the
demo is an actual live meeting, ask them to demonstrate
the features that are important to you.
That’s only part of the price story, however; extra charges
may apply for recording, archiving, audio conferencing,
toll-free long distance, international calling, and other
services. Also, some providers may offer volume discounts
or customized plans if you qualify.
Sign up for free training. Some providers offer free
training. If you want more detail than you got from the
on-line demo, sign up for a class. It’s time well spent for
evaluating different services and providers. And it may save
you some training time later on.
Complete pricing information is usually not published on
providers’ websites, so the only way to know for sure what
the service will cost you is to talk to the providers and get
detailed quotes. Before you can do that, though, you have to
know your web conferencing needs and priorities.
Try it for free. Take advantage of providers’ free trials
to play with the service on your own. You may not be
able to try everything you want, depending on how much
functionality the provider makes available in the trial, but it
should help you see if the service is easy to learn and use.
In the process, you may also have a chance to evaluate the
provider’s customer support.
Research
Once you know everything you need from web conferencing,
you can start looking at providers and evaluating their
services. Here’s how to go about it:
Talk to people. Many companies you know already use
web conferencing. Use your contacts to find out what
providers they use and what they think of the service and
provider, both good and bad. Keep in mind that their needs,
and therefore their experiences, may be different than yours
will be.
Search the Web. Google anything to do with “web
conferencing” and you’ll find plenty of useful information
including features and descriptions, pricing, blogs, forums,
reviews and lots of advice. When reading reviews, keep in
mind that the providers themselves may have written them.
Visit provider websites. Despite the marketing hype,
you can learn a lot from poking around web conferencing
provider websites. Most providers list basic service features,
pricing, and support options. Some of them also have web
conferencing case studies and whitepapers available for
download. Maker sure to find out if the provider is an OEM
or a reseller.
Attend web seminars. Look around the web for web
seminars that may be of interest to you. It’s a great way to get
familiar with web conferencing while learning something
useful. Some providers sponsor web seminars for this very
purpose.
Conduct a pilot. If you have time during the free trial,
try holding at least one actual meeting or seminar with it.
Of course, you’ll probably want to do this with internal
participants in case you have problems or there are
limitations with the service. But try to make it as real-life as
possible. If you can’t do this with the free trial, talk to the
provider about arranging a pilot evaluation.
Final Thoughts
There are many conferencing options out there from
which to choose. The important thing to know is how your
company plans on using it, your budget and your support
needs.
There are a lot of companies touting “free” conference
calling but in reality they are simply free to you but charge
your participants. Imagine conducting a training demo for
a prospect that takes an hour and then they receive long
distance charges for that call - not the greatest experience
for a potential customer.
Be careful of hidden fees as well. The only fees that are
acceptable and should appear on your conferencing bill
are taxes and the Federal Universal Service Fund (FUSF).
Conferencing fees, unused line fees and administrative fees
are all additional charges that ReadyTalk does not charge.
When purchasing from a provider, be clear on whether
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that provider is reseller, wholesaler or OEM. Make sure to
find out who will support the product should you need help.
Be aware of conferencing services that break their product
out
into different
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usage. If you originally source a product for department
meetings and then realize you want to run webinars, most
conferencing providers will require you to purchase a new
product to fit your needs. Most likely, this product will
have a different price point and require new training. At
ReadyTalk, all of the functionality we offer is under one
product at one price point.
Finally, your conferencing service reflects on you as a
company. You are not just picking a communications vendor
but a communications partner. Your partner needs to
make you look good in front of your clients, customers or
prospects. You need a service that is reliable and scalable
that can grow with your usage.
For more information about ReadyTalk and how we can help your
organization, please contact ReadyTalk Sales at 800.843.9166 or
[email protected]
About ReadyTalk
ReadyTalk is committed to helping customers conduct successful audio and web conferences of all sizes – from small, ad hoc meetings
to large, formal events. Visit www.readytalk.com to learn more about our full range of technology and services including:
Audio Conferencing / Web Conferencing / Event Services / Recordings and Podcasts
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