Last Updated on Saturday, April 18, 2020 by ProsCons
Conference call is one of the easiest ways of communication whenever you are in need of a collaboration tool for businesses today. It brings together both internal and external stakeholders for quick scheduled meetings, ad hoc conversations to brainstorm new ideas or to solve any problems. For a company, it is important to evaluate to weigh the pros and cons of conference call so as to ensure you’re offering the right tools to the right people. Below are some common pros and cons of conference calls.
Pros of Conference Calls
- Simplicity
One of the major advantages of conference all is that it uses the technology that everyone these days is familiar with: the mobile phone. Joining a conference call is as easy as dialing a mobile number while other collaboration tools such as virtual meeting may have different intuitive interfaces or methods, it still can cause failure or be quite confusing to some people.
- Flexibility
Conference calls are mostly done in the mobile phones as anyone that need to be a part of the call can easily join from a smart-phone through a dedicated mobile app or by simply dialing the conference line directly. Though there are many new features for a collaboration solution, audio conferencing is the best one as it is perfectly designed for mobile meters and on-the-go workers.
- Calendar Integrations
Because of the integration with systems like Microsoft Outlook which quickly allows invite creation with all of the relevant dial-in numbers and pass codes, scheduling conference call is quite easy. Also, there is a smart calendar app which will automatically connect you to an audio conference with a single click.
Also Read: Pros and Cons of Java Programming Language
Cons of Conference Calls
- Caller Confusion
As there is no availability of visual component, there may be confusion in an audio conference to identify the caller who is on the call and who is speaking when. This may lead to different callers end up taking over one another.
- Lack of content sharing
A face-to-face business meeting has screen sharing of documents and related topic presentations but a virtual meeting lack the intuitiveness of screen sharing of a document. Though you can always email a document around before a conference call and talk through it.
- Missed Messages
These days about 93% of communication is non-verbal: body language, eye and head movement, etc. As there is no visual component of web or video conferencing, there is lack of vital non-verbal cues that may describe about the customer or the way he is really thinking.
Hence, these are few of the pros and cons of conference call. You can definitely make a good use of it or ditch it for the old school traditional method of meeting.