How to Evaluate Conferencing Services for Productivity Gains

Assume nothing, assume the worst, use past conferencing data, and use your own end user device management and support data to build a model to analyze cost. By having a mindset where you assume nothing, you open your evaluation to all possibilities. Since evaluations don’t have unlimited time and resources, you will need to focus on the most important scenarios, but you have to at least understand the possible scenarios and their impact. 

When evaluating the join experience for the video or web conferencing component, think about the software installation requirements for participants both inside and outside the organization. Will participants come from an organization with strict controls on their PC environments? If you have important business partners with whom you interact regularly, be sure you have an understanding of their environments so that the lines of communication will be smooth.

Research the current web browser and device trends. Those will give you a sense of which browser and operating configurations are common, as well as the prevalence of older versions of Windows. Do you expect that your customers or partners will have Apple computers?

Which mobile devices are most prevalent? While Apple MacOS users often have issues when installing web components before joining a meeting, Windows users often have audio issues where they either can’t hear or can't be heard because of configuration issues with their devices. To address this possibility, see if the solutions you are evaluating will enable users to close a meeting application and rejoin if there is an audio configuration issue.

One feature that often trips me up as a meeting attendee is the prompt to state your name prior to joining a conference call. I expect that stating my name results in an announcement to attendees that I am joining the call. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. If there is silence on the call and I’m multitasking, I can forget to announce myself. Survey users to see what their behavior is under similar circumstances. What type of delays can that cause?

For security reasons, at a minimum, there should be a tone when attendees join meetings with 10 or fewer participants. That prompts the organizer to ask who has joined, which helps attendees identify if they’ve joined with their headset on mute. How much time is wasted when participants think they are speaking to the group but aren’t being heard?  

Another important detail to evaluate is if the scheduling component automatically inserts mobile-friendly dial-in and conference code information for conferencing calls. It shouldn’t fall to users to include this information themselves. How does the solution support switching from mobile to desktop phones on networks with mobile unified communications?

Finally, if a solution touts noise cancelling technology, test it. Join a meeting from your cafeteria during lunch, type away on the loudest keyboard you can find, put a fan on your desk and crank it to full speed to see how well that noise cancelling tech works. Fighting to be heard over a single caller’s ambient noise is a productivity killer, and any solution that solves that problem for even a couple of meetings a month could pay for itself.