If you’re a small to medium-sized business you probably spend a lot of time travelling to and from meetings or on the telephone. These days you also probably do a lot of your business online, such as dealing with customers and conducting research. So it makes sense that the old school idea of “going to a meeting” would move online as well.
Welcome to the world of video conferencing.
If you’re thinking, ‘this is not for me’, here are just a few reasons why you should think about video conferencing:
- It cuts travel costs at a time when budgets are tight (and less travel means more time for other things, like updating your Tradespace. Plus it’s better for the environment!)
- Your business becomes more personal. If you’re in Land’s End and your best customer is in John O’Groats, you can now put a face to their name.
- Sharing information is easier. Show documents or videos to staff or customers that help explain yourself clearer while customers can show you if something’s wrong.
A good example of cost cutting was when HSBC switched to video conferencing between its London and Hong Kong offices last year. It saved £370,000 on flights and reduced staff travel by 522,000 miles in the first month alone. Now, your business may not be the size of HSBC but you can still benefit – and all you need is a computer, the Internet and a webcam.
These days even basic video conferencing tools offer much more functionality than just video. Not only do you get a face-to-face meeting, but you can also share documents, photographs and graphics that will help get your message across. This helps, whether you’re pitching for new business or showing a customer how to fix a broken tap.
Video conferencing lets you show instead of tell.
What’s video conferencing got to do BT Tradespace?
If you missed it in last month’s newsletter, we’ve started a free three-month trial with video conferencing experts, ooVoo that is still open to BT Tradespace users. Now we don’t normally talk about things before we’ve given it a try ourselves, so the BT Tradespace team tried and tested it and here’s what we loved about the ooVoo video conferencing tool:
- We could connect with anyone, anytime, with video calls, video messages and more
- We could video call, see, hear and speak with up to six of the team at a time.
- We could video call from our web browsers.
- For the sake of auditing (or remembering in our case) we recorded calls and kept it on file.
- For those of us who were desktop proud we could share our desktops plus documents and photos.
- It’s a fantastic experience with top quality sound and video.
- And privacy controls manages who sees or contacts you.
Plus, Paul, a Tradespacer who runs his own web design company, also left us a comment about using the ooVoo service and here’s what he had to say:
“I would recommend ooVoo to anyone, a great way of keeping in touch with your customers face to face, and much higher quality than other providers. I’m very pleased to see BT and ooVoo have joined up in providing a service every business could use. The Free version is excellent, don’t think you have to pay; I use ooVoo as a live support tool on my site. I’ve used ooVoo for years, and I’m very pleased to see they made it this far. Well done!!!”
Download ooVoo and try free video conferencing now!
