Top-10 Conference Call Best Practices
Conference calls remain a fact of life in business. And for good reason, they’re a great way to convene a meeting without the inconvenience of travel. The following are ten simple ideas that will help make your conference experience productive.
1. Be on time.
Dial in at least a minute or two ahead of the scheduled time. Don’t keep others waiting. If using ZipDX, enable the ZipDX call-me feature, which guarantees you’ll never be late again.
2. Choose a quiet spot and a good phone.
Background noise and poor sound quality is disturbing to everyone on the call and makes the call less productive. If you’re in the office, dial in from a private room; in public places, choose a quiet spot. If a landline is available, use it, rather than a lower-quality mobile connection. If presenting, try to use a headset. Avoid Skype and similar free services unless you’ve confirmed that you get consistently good quality results.
3. Avoid cheap speakerphones.
You can listen on a low-quality set, but when you speak, pick up the handset unless you have a truly high-fidelity speakerphone.
4. Use muting.
If you are primarily listening, mute yourself except when talking. ZipDX provides muting for individual lines by dialing *6 when in the call. Plus, ZipDX members have access to our innovative online dashboard that lets you mute call participants. Log in to ZipDX.com, find your in-progress conference, and click on “dashboard” to view it.
5. No music-on-hold!
Many phone systems play music on hold or with call-waiting. If you must invoke these features on your business phone, use the conference mute (*6 with ZipDX) BEFORE putting the conference on hold.
6. Disable other noisemakers.
Turn off PC speakers, radios, mobile phones – anything that might produce noise that will distract from the conference. If working from home turn off the TV and close the door, leaving the dog outside.
7. Identify yourself, and speak up.
If you haven’t talked for a while, listeners will probably have a hard time recognizing your voice. State your name as you start, and speak clearly, distinctly and directly into the handset or microphone.
8. Position microphones.
If you are in a conference room, insure your equipment is suitable for the size of the room and number of participants. With more than just a few people, extra microphones will be required. Position them near the primary talkers; move them away from PC and projector fans. Don’t let them get blocked by laptop covers or potato chip bags.
9. No side conversations.
While the conference is in-progress, only one person should talk at a time. If others are having their own conversations, it will be very difficult for remote participants to understand the primary speaker.
If you need to have a private chat with another remote participant, make use of one of our handy breakout rooms. That way your sidebar doesn’t bring the entire meeting to a halt.
10. Handouts.
If you’ve got materials to present, distribute them in advance to the other participants. Or better yet, take control of the presentation live using our Web Share feature.
Questions?
If you have questions about any aspect of ZipDX please contact our support team at:
- 1-888-947-3955,
- Or, +1-312-348-8175,
- Or, email support@zipdx.com.
We’re here to help you get down to business.
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