How To Make Your Conference Calls Better

Conference calls are something any person involved in business is familiar with, sometimes more than once a day. There are tons of conference calling services out there and sometimes we tend to use a traditional approach, where the participants are provided with a phone number to dial plus a PIN to join a conference room.

While this has worked very well in the past years, now there are other much more effective ways to make your conference call better and, moreover, save precious time and money. I just finished a conf call a couple of minutes ago, where I had to call a premium UK number and the other participants were from UK and India, all calling the same number. You know what? I ended up spelling a phone number to the indian guys who couldn’t hear me very well and we spent 1 minute to check if that number was correct. And I spent a lot of money.

What?!?!? No please, no more. There are much better ways to to that. An alternative could have been Skype but not everyone is willing to use headphones and sometimes there are participants who are on the go so they necessarily need to join the call by using their mobile phone.

All that said, an alternative solution I discovered and watched closer lately is Calliflower from my friends at Iotum. It is a very easy to use solution who provides you with a powerful web based user interface and three alternative ways to join: participants can dial a local number, they can call from the web or being called back to their landline.

You can see who is speaking, you can create moderated calls for many participants, you can share documents, you can chat, you can have lots of features you don’t usually have with other traditional services. Moreover, it is fully integrated with Facebook (they started as a Facebook app), something anyone is using these days.

Everything is designed taking care of any minimum detail in order to make your conference call experience as better as they can. Other important features that are worth a mention are:

- mp3 recording: you can record the conference call for future usage

- calendar integration: you can accept the call invitations from different calendar apps (web based and not)

- iPhone application: you can use the Calliflower app to get an experience very close to that you get on the web.

I would also like to point out that Calliflower is a great service that you can use it for a normal one to one call, too, not only for conference calls which involve many participants. It is very useful to make your call more effective.

All that said, there are some features not available in the free package but you can get everything for just $50 / month, or save $100 if you get billed in advance ($500 / year). Anyway, you can test it out for 14 days then choose whether to sign up or not. I guess you’ll stick with it as soon as you try it

Did you try it? Please let me know your thoughts and co

Related articles by Zemanta

• Set Up and Make CalliFlower Conference Calls from Your iPhone (Voice On The Web)
• Calliflower’s Free Conference Call service goes ad funded. (saunderslog.com)
• Entrepreneur Magazine picks Calliflower (saunderslog.com)
• Calliflower on iPhone releases. (saunderslog.com)

Tagged as: calliflower, conference call, facebook, iotum, luca filigheddu