Successful Commercial Real Estate Company Employs InterCall Reservationless-Plus

Earlier this month a successful commercial real estate company contacted our team at ConferenceShopper.com because they were looking for a convenient and economical way to connect and collaborate with their multiple branch offices. After discussing their wants and requirements, our team of professional account managers suggested InterCall's Reservationless-Plus conferencing solution.

The fact that InterCall Reservationless-Plus provides anytime access to hosting conferences with up to 150 people with no reservation requirements was reason enough for the aforementioned commercial real estate company to make the switch, but what really set InterCall Reservationless-Plus apart from the rest of the competition is the comprehensive list of features included with the service.

InterCall's Reservationless-Plus service includes features, such as:

• Auto continuation – your attendees can remain on the call without you, and the conference ends as soon as the last attendee disconnects
• Custom greeting or welcome message – make a customized recording for your attendees to hear upon entering your conference
• Conference entry mode – select from lecture, group mute, or un-mute mode for attendees joining your call
• Dial-out – from your meeting to bring domestic attendees into your conference (for international attendees an operator can dial-out)
• Entry and exit options – you decide how your attendees are announced upon entering or leaving your conference call
• Forced disconnect – very convenient when you have back to back meetings, this lets you disconnect all of your attendees while you remain on the line
• Lecture mode – make sure there are no interruptions during your presentation; keeping your attendees on mute ensures no background noise disruption
• Online management – do everything from scheduling and starting a conference to reviewing archived calls in a user-friendly online format
• Operator assistance – at any time throughout the duration of your conference you can request operator assistance privately (by pressing 00) or for your entire group (by pressing *0)
• Record – record and store your meetings to help attendees retain important information, and for attendees unable to make the live conference

Additional features include: international express dialing, third-party conference start, roll call, self mute/un-mute, waiting room, quick start, post-conference emails, project accounting codes, participant list, private participant count, phone commands, multiple leaders, and mobile assistant.

InterCall Reservationless-Plus is ideal for last minute mission-critical conferences, sales presentations and follow-ups, weekly status reports, and collaborating with employees and team members in remote locations.

Benefits

• Optional easy-to-use scheduling through Outlook
• iPhone & Blackberry apps for joining or starting calls in a flash
• User-friendly – to begin your conference, simply dial your specific dedicated number, conference code, and PIN number – and you're in!

Source: Conferencing Services

InterCall Provides Conferencing Services for Everyone – Even SMBs

From the beginning InterCall has designed services for companies of all sizes, although historically a large portion of their business has come from large organizations. Their strong world-encompassing customer base is a big part of what helps them continuously improve their offerings to keep their products and services evolving.

In the last couple years, however, InterCall has noticed the number of small and medium businesses rise. These new companies also want to take advantage of the benefits that conferencing services offer, provided they meet their unique and individual needs.

Packages

InterCall offers both dedicated audio conferencing and an audio web combination package. Both of these solutions provide you with your own virtual meeting room available 24/7.

Dedicated Audio Conferencing – schedule and plan your meeting ahead of time, or start one on-the-fly. Your dedicated conference code and dial-in number is ready to go every time. You also have access to instant operator assistance as well as project codes for client bill-back.

• Instant operator assistance
• Low flat rate for unlimited usage
• Dedicated conference code and dial-in number
• No reservations needed, access your conference at anytime

Audio/web combination package – don't just tell them what you're talking about, show them. InterCall's audio and web conferencing combination is tightly integrated, providing you with two services in one user-friendly online interface.

• Send polling questions
• One-click access to meetings
• Present product demonstrations online
• Schedule your conferences from Outlook
• Edit documents and collaborate in real-time
• Share your desktop, applications, and presentations

Quality of Service

InterCall believes that it's not the size of the business that matters – it's how professional you look and perform for your potential customers that matters. InterCall's conferencing services run on the same platform as their enterprise level web and audio conferencing services, so you receive the same uptime, reliability, and quality as their Fortune 100 customers.

Why Choose InterCall?

With a team of over 1500 call supervisors, customer service reps, operators, IT, marketing, and accounting professionals and more than 500 meeting consultants, InterCall is the largest provider of conferencing services in the world. As a whole, InterCall serves in excess of 40,000 companies worldwide, and more than 400,000 individual conference leaders.

Additional Resources

For more information on how InterCall audio and web conferencing services can help your business succeed, contact one of our professional account managers today!

Source: Conferencing Services

The World's Highest Conference Call

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to stand on top of the world's tallest mountain? Well now you can… from the comfort and convenience of your desk!

Tomorrow, Cisco engineer Brian Dickinson will be embarking on his final ascent to Mt. Everest's peak –  a whopping 29,035 feet above sea level – and thanks to WebEx technology you can join him on his exhausting emotional and physical expedition. From Base Camp (17,500ft) Brian will answer your questions, talk about his trainings and challenges taken to prepare for the climb, what is currently on his mind, as well as discuss his three previous climbs.

You read that right. Brian has previously climbed three other mountains (Mt. McKinley in Alaska in May of 2009, Mt. Kilimanjaro in north-eastern Tanzania in February 2010, and Mt. Elbrus in Russia in July of 2010) on his quest to scale The Seven Summits while raising money for HIV/AIDS research and bringing gifts to orphanages in each country he visits.

Born and raised in Southern Oregon, Brian is an extreme outdoorsman and athlete. For six years he was stationed in San Diego as a helicopter rescue swimmer for the Navy. It was there he met his wife, JoAnna, and they went on to have two beautiful children, Jordan and Emily. In addition to working with Cisco, Brian runs Extreme Adventures, an outreach program that teaches leadership and confidence via biking, hiking, and rappelling.

The Consequences of High Altitude
After experiencing a cold, massive headaches, and a quick scare with what was thought to be the on-set of High Altitude Cerebral Edema, (an increase of fluid in the brain that can cause coma and even death) Brian decided not to take any chances and hiked back down the mountain to a lower elevation in order to get acclimated. He spoke of his frustrations in his blog on Climbing.com, saying that "at this point I am a bit frustrated. It's not fair that less physically fit and less driven people are in a better position to climb the highest peak on earth. With something like HACE there's nothing I can do from a physiological standpoint."

Luckily, Brian fully recovered at a slightly lower elevation, refuses to let the hiccup slow him down. He has since returned to Base Camp, hiked to Base Camp II, (the penultimate step in the acclimatization process at 21,500ft) made it to Base Camp III, and will return to Base Camp for the conference on May 4^th.

What started as a personal journey has quickly become an amazing world-wide adventure reaching far beyond his expectations. All the while, Brian has maintained his sense of humor, letting his blog readers know that, "If someone could please drop ship either a carne asada burrito from Roberto's in San Diego or a double-double animal style from In-n-Out Burger I sure would appreciate it!"

To register for the May 4^th conference with  Brian, follow this link: http://www.webex.com/webinars/Meeting-Mt-Everest-Live-from-the-Climb

 

The Khumbu Ice Fall – treacherous and thrilling.

Brian at Camp I.
In late March, we met Brian Dickinson via WebEx before he left for his Mt Everest climb. In that session, we learned about Brian, his Navy background, his passion for extreme sports and his desire to climb The Seven Summits.

While pursuing his incredible goal, Brian turned his journey into a cause to raise money for AIDS Research and to connect with the children at orphanages in the countries he visits. Click here to watch "Before the Climb" with Brian Dickinson

There has been a ton of press around 3G Internet coverage at Everest basecamp. Not true. NCELL offers 3G coverage from a village a few miles down the Khumbu Valley, called Gorak Shep. The 3G towers are run by solar panels so in bad weather and at night they are shutdown. And they don't have the strength to send a 3G signal to basecamp. We get edge coverage, which works for cell phone calls and very poor quality Internet (almost unusable). To upload these blog entries, add pics to Facebook, Twitter, email, etc. I have to hike 30 minutes out of basecamp up on a ridge and climb a large boulder, which has direct line of sight to Gorak Shep. The view from the rock is the most amazing place I've ever been with views of the ice fall crawling up the mountain, the summit of Mount Everest and all of the surrounding Himalaya peaks. I'm sure NCELL will resolve the coverage in future years, but for now it's a lot of effort to stay connected.

What's next? On the 30th (tomorrow) we are heading directly up to Camp II (21,000'), where we'll sleep for 2 nights. We will then climb the Lhotse Face to Camp III (23,000') and descend back to Camp II. The following day we'll climb back to Camp III and sleep on oxygen. That will complete our acclimatization process for a summit bid, at which point we'll bring it all the way back to basecamp to wait for a weather window to make our attack on the summit!

You can keep track of Brian's progress via his blog on climbing.com

For those not able to watch the live conference, it will be recorded so you can listen in later.

Source: Conferencing Services

Improve your Conferences in 2 Steps

Both audio conferencing and web conferencing offer countless benefits – ranging all the way from cost savings to a smaller carbon footprint. However, in order to acquire the highest return on your conferencing services investment, it is crucial that every meeting you conduct is as productive and effective as possible. So far this month we’ve covered the top 5 most essential features for any web conference as well as the top 5 mistakes web conferencing hosts make. Now, I’m going to offer you a couple zealous suggestions for enhancing (and adding a little spice) to your conferences.

1. First and foremost, your conferences should be about, by and for your participants. They should feel encouraged to offer feedback and participate through multiple venues, for example, white boarding, chat, polling, and Q&A sessions. Thankfully, conferencing services offer multiple features that ensure participants are actively involved in meetings.
   For conferences with a large group of participants, a moderator is preferred to keep the conference on track and under control. Your moderator/MC should challenge, integrate, pull together, and basically act as the ambassador of your participants. That doesn’t mean you’re off the hook though, you need to be just as active in your conference as any moderator, MC, speaker or presenter – don’t just be a warm body!
2. In order to keep your audience interested and actively engaged in your conference, try restructuring it. Break away from the mundane ‘pick a theme, an opening and/or closing speaker, and in between the same old stuff’ that makes participants feel like they’re in a typical workday that their boss has scheduled for them. Instead, keep your audience fascinated by letting your conference tell a unique story. As with any good story, there are valleys of calm, rises of anticipation, and ultimately peaks of exhilaration and excitement – something light-years away from boredom and panic in perpetual alteration. That being said, your conference should also make sense from a linear start-to-finish point of view. That way your participants are more likely to retain the information they take in as opposed to feeling overwhelmed.

Additional Resources
At ConferenceShopper.com we provide our customers with private labeled audio and web conferencing services, IP transit, and private line services via a network of Tier One providers. Our winning combination of experienced account managers and unique relationships inside the telecommunications industry allow us to provide our customers with unbiased, carrier neutral suggestions as to how they should handle their communications services for the best prices available.

Video Phones in the Office?

The rise and fall of video phone providers and manufacturers have left today's companies with little to choose from the in way of reasonably priced solutions. And despite provider's pitches, company uptake has never approached vendor's prediction casts. This begs the question: will video phones ever make sense for business users?

Video Conferencing offers countless benefits, such as:

• Enhanced productivity and reduced costs – eliminating the need for business travel keeps your staff in-house, allowing  for more time to be spent on mission-critical issues, and less money spent on travel
• Better business relationships – the convenience of video conferencing allows you to meet with your customers, partners, and employees more frequently and effectively, with quality that rivals in-person meetings
• Instant feedback – meet and collaborate with your international branches and customers in remote areas

Thanks to vendor's aggressive marketing, video conferencing technology has made considerable headway into the corporate conference room over the past ten years. That being said however, the average employee's desktop continues to be devoid of this collaborative tool.

Despite multiple reports that show desktop video technology enhances employee productivity and offers a noteworthy return on investment, many companies today still seem apprehensive about utilize desktop video conferencing technologies. Perhaps it is due to misconceptions – either about bandwidth use or dependability – but more than likely the main concern that keeps customers from employing video phone technology is its cost.

In an attempt to ease customer apprehension and make video phones a more viable alternative to deskbound phones, providers are looking for ways to bring costs down, so they average similar to what you would pay for a VoIP handset. Unfortunately, compromises have to be made to make that a possibility. For instance, one cost-efficient video phone might be built to work only with a specific vendor's hosted VoIP service, while another uses public video conferencing services (like Skype). Others, still, work with a majority of the leading VoIP and video conferencing standards and provide comprehensive features, like H.323.  Skeptical vendors are opting to go for the more conventional video phone system that blends single-user video conferencing ability with multiline VoIP/SIP phones.

Here at ConferenceShopper.com, our partnership with the industry's leading providers allows us to offer you the most comprehensive and cost-efficient conferencing solutions available on the market.

Now we want to know what you think about video conferencing. Have you had any good/bad experiences with video conferencing? Do you think it'll become a 'thing of the past'?

Source: Conferencing Services

InterCall's Acquisition of Unisfair

InterCall's Acquisition of Unisfair – Keeping Pace with the Continuously Evolving Face of Domestic and International Business Communication Needs

In this day and age, it's a given that technology is constantly evolving. Businesses are looking to expand their reach and effectiveness while cutting costs – and conferencing services have the power to do just that. Not long ago, the ability for a business to host any virtual event was considered a luxury. Now however, conferencing services are quickly becoming a must-have tool as more and more businesses are looking to host large, engaging virtual events.

InterCall is the largest web conferencing service provider in the world and offers the broadest range of services to support the unique and changing needs of all businesses. That being said, much has changed during InterCall's 20+ years of existence. Back in 1991, operator assisted conferencing was the wave of the future; then came reservationless conferencing. Today, as a growing number of workers around the world are going mobile, InterCall continues to evolve as well offering the broadest range of services to support the shifting requirements of small and large businesses.

A little over a month ago, InterCall acquired one of the leading worldwide providers of business environments and virtual events, Unisfair, and has been working toward incorporating their services into InterCall's suite of event products. For over a decade, Unisfair has led the virtual events space and provided cloud applications to enable businesses to create interactive and branded virtual environments. Their environments are engaging, user-friendly, and permit a highly interactive experience via exhibition floors, networking areas, and speaking sessions. Furthermore, Unisfair delivers extraordinary marketing intelligence by tracking every participant's activities.

This acquisition is expected to mean great things for businesses that are already hosting remote, online events as well as those looking to employ those services. Both InterCall and Unisfair share a vision of providing top-quality technology to improve worldwide virtual collaboration and communication. As a result, InterCall is excited to now offer complete end-to-end solutions on a proprietary platform – from simple webcasts to immersive and comprehensive virtual presentations.

Here at ConferenceShopper.com, our close partnership with InterCall allows us to provide you with the top industry-leading conferencing services currently in the market for the best available price.

Now it's time to tell us what you think. What are your thoughts on InterCall's acquisition of Unisfair? How do you think it will impact the communications industry as a whole?

Source: Conferencing Services