Insights

We thought you would like to take a look at this blog on No Nonsense Conference Calls. It’s the thoughts of Shawn Frey on how to utilize conference calling in training sales agents and meeting with a group of peers, ideally between four and seven callers.

Recently, a member of our company drove back from a great evening of fun in DesMoines where Garrison Keillor and his Prairie Home Companion show had performed. She noticed a lot of cars swerving into her lane. Her first thought, “Is everybody drunk tonight?” And then she realized the culprit: drivers using their cell phones. The New York Times has an interesting article called  High Tech Baby Sitter Gets Drivers Off Cell Phone that addresses this issue. Some companies have instituted high tech solutions that prevent employees from using cell phones while driving. Every day there are thousands of drivers dialing into conferencing systems to discuss business. This certainly imperils them and other drivers on the road.

We have a low tech solution for conference calling drivers–please pull into a service area and conduct the call from there.

Conrad Hilton’s message to America?

“Please put your shower curtaino  inside the bath tub.” This must have been born of many years experience seeing how water spreads and leaks to the floor below.

Our company, Conference Calls Unlimited, also has a message for America. Please mute your conference line when not speaking. This message is born of how much sound leaks unintentionally into a conference call. It can be anything from pots and pans falling to the floor, background restaurant noises, colleagues at work talking, to road noise from a driving cellphone warrior.

Noise can also come from VOIP phones, speaker phones, cell phone static, etc. Fortunately if noisy participants are clueless the host can mute everyone out. Some of  our services  have a web page where the host can monitor the lines and mute out a specific offending line.

So please America put your curtains inside the bath tub and mute your line on conference calls.

Sometimes a conference call can lead to unexpected interpretations. This results from differences in culture, language, and interpretations of technical language, etc. The following humorous video highlights such a situation.