Low-cost, easy to use audio and web conferencing blog

As an avid listener to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme I increasing find myself shouting “WHY DON’T YOU GET IT YOU FOOLS?” though my cornflakes as politicians try to ‘out green’ each other on transport policy.

Surely the best way to minimise the environmental impact of travelling is not to travel in the first place.

Rather than debate the ins and outs of alternative fuels and arbitrary tax increases, concentrate on removing the problem at source. Stay were you are, meet by web and phone instead. It’s the archetypal “no brainer” isn’t it?

Think about it. No carbon emissions, no road congestion, less wasted time between meetings, better work-life balance and IT’S CHEAPER. Hard to see the downside really.

So why isn’t the use of technology to allow remote working not spoken about more often?

Meetings held by phone and web will never be able to replace all face to face meetings, but they can replace a large proportion of them. I know because I meet this way several times a day.

Of course, as the CEO of an audio and web conferencing company, “I would say that, wouldn’t I”, but the reason I got into this business in the first place is because I used similar services in previous jobs and couldn’t see how I could have worked without them.

I can easily attend 6 virtual meetings a day and I am home when I put the phone down after the last of them.

Armed with an increasingly expensive travel card, I am lucky if I can do half as many face to face meetings in and around London - and I am in a foul mood when I get home late due some unforeseen but inevitable problem on public transport.

Peter Bennett - CEO Ozone Conferencing.

How do you get four women to agree to a weekend away and get all the arrangement sorted in 25 minutes?

I decided to try the OzoneLITE Conferencing system and get all four women on the phone at the same time, just as I do in my business life.

The result was very satisfying, once the women had overcome their phobia of tele-conferencing and realised just how easy it is to dial a number, enter a code and then say ‘hello’! The women, all good friends of mine, are based in Leicester, Nottingham, London and Swindon and we try to get away together once a year.

I organised the call, had in mind a brief ‘agenda’ and encouraged them to look at a particular holiday venue website beforehand. Once they got the hang of speaking one-at-a-time, and got through the pleasantries, we went on to discuss our holiday options, dates and venue. Actions were agreed between us before we ended with general New Year best wishes.

It was fun to do and easy to arrange. I think we will continue to use this method of communicating as it is very cost-effective and quite fun to have everyone linked-up at the same time.

Louise Third

Nottingham

Every week I attend a meeting of a local Business Network International (BNI) chapter. As an exercise in demonstrating the cost savings of our OzoneLITE telephone conferencing service, I decided to see how much we could save by meeting on the phone.

The conclusion is that each member would save at least £16.12 per week representing an overall saving of over £300 per week for the group as a whole. Working below.

Cost of attending BNI meeting in person each week, £20.62

Assumptions:

• Cost of your time is £5.05 per hour (UK minimum wage)
• Incremental travelling time 1 hour per week
• Incremental cost of travel is zero (assumed covered by Oyster card)
• Cost of meeting room hire £8
• BNI meeting lasts 90 mins

Cost = travel time + meeting time + room hire

Cost = £5.05 + £7.57 + £8.00

Cost = £20.62

Cost of attending BNI meeting by telephone conference, £4.50 (a saving of £16.12)

Assumptions:

• Cost of your time is £5.05 per hour (UK minimum wage)
• Incremental travelling time, zero
• Cost of telephone call 90 mins @ £0.05 pence per min

Cost = telephone call

Cost = £4.50

Overall Chapter savings, assuming 20 chapter members, would be over £300 per week.

DISCLAIMER: Meeting by phone can never replace all face to face meetings. However, where groups of people know each other well, considerable savings can be made.

BNI meetings would not be effective if held by telephone as they rely on building personal relationships.

The example above is for illustration purposes only and demonstrates the savings which a small company could achieve by holding its weekly team meetings using OzoneLITE.

I spend most of my working days dipping in and out of telephone conferences and couldn’t really do my job without this sort of technology.

I just wondered how many other people out there would consider telephone conferencing as integral to their working day?

Here’s a bunch of interesting figures which I took from a survey printed in a supplement in The Independent Newspaper (at least I *think* it was The Independent).  

• The average European business manager will participate in 559 meetings a year – this equates to 47 meetings in a typical working month, or 12 in a week or 2 a day.
• Face to face meetings are still the most popular method of meeting with employees, partners, suppliers and customers for business managers – and on average 73% of all meetings are held in this way.
• European business managers have an average of 408 face-to-face meetings a year – equivalent to 34 face to face meetings in a typical working month, or 9 a week or 2 a day.
• On average, managers in Germany have more face-to-face meetings per month (43 meetings) than do managers in the UK (28 meetings) and France (30 meetings).
• Managers in the UK hold more of their meetings in a face-to-face format (79%), compared to France (73%) and Germany (66%). An additional 27% of meetings are carried out as telephone conference calls (20%) or as online meetings (7%). Read the rest of this entry »

A Telephone Conference is simply a ‘meeting on the phone’. There is no need to leave your desk and fight with public transport or traffic jams and you don’t create unnecessary pollution.

People who have never participated in a Phone Conference often find it hard to appreciate the benefits they offer. However, once they try the service they quickly become hooked.

In modern business time is money. Telephone Conferences save so much time & money that they quickly become the preferred meeting option.

I have been attending and chairing Telephone Conferences almost daily for over 10 years and am a firm believer in their effectiveness.

For instance, we have a 15 minute company-wide morning meeting via Telephone Conference each day where management report status and set priorities. It costs virtually nothing and means that everyone is kept informed and up to date.

During the day, if unexpected issues arise, my team use the system on an ad-hoc basis to get together in a matter of seconds to address them before they become problems.

It doesn’t matter where in the world your staff are or if they are on mobiles or landlines. You can meet up quickly and easily without have to pre-book.

Many companies use teleconferencing as a routine part of their business but have you considered using OzoneLITE teleconferencing outside of work too?

If you need to arrange a social event such as a stag party or family get together, OzoneLITE might be just what you need to get everyone on the same page. At 5p a min with no bills it is cheap and convenient to use.

I admit that I am a teleconferencing fanatic but it has certainly helped me out on more than one occasion.

Some numbers, gleaned from various sources which puts climate change in perspective for me. 

Once we hit the carbon inflection point, it will not be possible to reverse climate change due to feedback mechanisms which will further exasperate the problems.

One of our customers asked us today how the costs using our LanguageBridge telephone interpreting service compared with using a traditional face-to-face interpreter so I thought I’d share.

Their plan was to have a representative from a Spanish supplier visit their offices in London for a chat lasting about an hour concerning how they can work together more efficiently (the relationship had soured due to some recent problems).

They were quoted approximately £320 plus VAT plus travel expenses for half a day of a face to face Spanish <> English interpreter’s time. Travel expenses would only be a London travel card so the total was about £325 (Although the meeting was only an hour, interpreters usually work on a minimum booking of half a day).

Using our LangaugeBridge telephone interpreting system the charges worked out at about £180 plus VAT with the added advantage that the meeting can happen this week as opposed to in 3 weeks time when the supplier happened to be in the UK (it would have been prohibitively expensive to fly the supplier over just for this purpose).

So, in summary, using our LanguageBridge worked out at just over half the price of a face to face interpreter and meant that the meeting could go ahead pretty much immediately increasing the changes of stopping the relationship from going really badly wrong.