Video conferencing has gotten big – much bigger than it was only about a decade ago. It wasn’t that long ago when getting people together for a project meant physically getting them together – not starting a chat room and working away with the help of sophisticated collaboration software and more.
But times have changed, and just as the fax machine was an office norm twenty years ago, we now have video calls becoming a normal form of professional communication along the entire size spectrum of businesses.
While video calling is a great asset to pretty much any company that works internationally and has clientele abroad, most companies often don’t opt for the premium services and instead snag themselves a free VOIP provider and call it a day. They ask themselves: Is it really important, though? Do I really need a cloud-based video conference platform with features from secure file sharing to screen sharing capabilities?
The answer depends. It depends on several factors – it depends on the growth of your business, it depends on where your clients and partners are located, it depends on what industry you work in, what kind of a budget you have and what you stand to gain from a reputable cloud-based video conference provider like BlueJeans and their SME solutions. So let’s take a look and answer this question thoroughly – through several other questions.
Where Is Your Business?
Location is pretty important, although this isn’t about the actual physical location of your office or headquarters. Rather, this is a question of where your business operates. If you’re a single little coffee shop operating within a neighborhood with great potential – perhaps a university town, with lots of foot traffic – then you won’t have to worry about the benefits of video conferencing.
The landscape changes drastically when you’re an internationally-based startup planning a multinational software or product launch, or perhaps a B2B service provider looking to expand your clientele from the local mom-and-pop shops to the digital world.
Any level of serious expansion into the internet will require one certain thing from you: the ability to properly communicate with partners and clients alike. And communication in a world of data entropy is hard to achieve effectively with only text or audio.
Whether it’s to launch a webinar or to hold an extended project briefing with a client, a premium cloud-based video software will put you far ahead of the competition in terms of quality service and cooperation.
Do You Manage Virtual Teams?
Virtual teams are a fairly recent development in the world of business collaboration and globalization – through the Internet, IT departments from several different continents and companies can come together to work in total unity on a software project – despite never ever physically meeting.
It’s all through video communication, email, and chatting. But as per the Harvard Business Review, without the right communication charter, a virtual team falls apart, and leaves a big and expensive mess. Managing a team across the entire world to work together requires a lot of specific task allocation, careful planning, and some level of camaraderie and passion afforded by face-to-face meetings.
You want your team members to know each other professionally and personally, so they can better work together and communicate autonomously. A free VOIP won’t do the trick there – today’s top-of-the-line cloud-based solutions offer companies a cost-effective way to not only facilitate better communication, but also equip virtual teams with a myriad of collaborative tools in order to get their jobs done in a better, more efficient manner.
Do You Provide Customer Support?
If you’re offering online web support, then utilizing a free VOIP or alternative calling solution will come with a number of problems, from the quality of the call (low) to the ease-of-use for potential customers arriving with serious problems (also low).
The solution, then, is a calling software that promises device interoperability – allowing software license owners to send out invite codes for potential call members to (without an account or any further installation) join into an existing call through any applicable device’s web browser, from a smartphone to a PC. Then problems can easily be solved through face-to-face instructions, screen sharing and more.
Do You Have to Travel For Meetings?
If you’ve got the problem of having to schedule huge travel trips to meet clients or partners for business purposes, then you may have already considered video calling as a solution. However, you may have skipped it because you felt that it might feel too impersonal – or unprofessional.
The fact is, plenty of businesses have been utilizing video conferencing to replace their face-to-face meetings without backlash, and you don’t have to switch from one extreme to another. Simply save physical trips to only the most important of meetings. As per Tnooz: video conferencing supplements business travel. Alternatively, it helps travelers stay close to their family on the road.
If any of these questions make a professional video conferencing service apply to your business’ needs, then you’ve got all the necessary reason.