Okay, let’s be honest now. How many times have you accidentally hung up on a caller while trying to set up a three-way call? It’s okay to admit it…we’ve all done it. Sometimes you hang up on one person, sometimes both…one time I think I even connected the other two callers and somehow hung up on myself! Or worse yet, you have one person on the line and you call the second and get their voicemail or a busy signal. You think you hung up on the second person only to realize that you transferred the first person to the second person’s voicemail or busy line. Managing those conference calls sometimes feels like a complicated set of events that needs to be precisely set in motion at specific times in the space-time continuum, or it is doomed to fail. Now imagine trying to conference in three, five, ten or even more people!
Okay, I’m breaking into a nervous sweat just thinking about it. Fortunately, after hanging up on an important person during a three-way call attempt gone awry, many people learn to avoid this embarrassing and frustration situation. Not by learning how to actually use the three-way feature properly…we don’t all have the time or energy to get a Doctorate degree on the topic! But we can avoid it by finding better ways to handle the situation.
I’ve dealt with it by relying more on TelePacific’s Conference Central. Instead of trying to individually call everyone and suffering small cardiac arrests every time I cautiously wait to see if I actually succeeded in connecting each additional caller, I just send everyone an email with a phone number and meeting ID. They call that toll free number, enter the PIN and there I am waiting to start our call and not spending the next 20 minutes just trying to get everyone on the line. It’s easier for everyone and much less stressful for me.
I typically just include the call-in information on every meeting invitation that I send. That way it’s on everyone’s calendar and easy to access when it’s time to meet. And with Conference Central, it’s also easy to set up a conference call on the fly. There’s no need for reservations, so you can have everyone dial in immediately. And if some of the invitees can’t make the meeting, no sweat and no issues with subjecting the entire group to a voicemail or busy signal. You can record the call and email a link to the audio recording so that they can be in the loop and not miss a thing. It really is that simple.
You can set up Conference Central so that each employee has his or her own conference ID and PIN number, which is nice because then you don’t have to worry about whether or not there’s a conference line available. And because each call has a conference ID, you can track each call by person and project, so you can bill the call to a specific project or client if appropriate.
Conference Central is replete with cool features, like muting participants (you know you want this feature), hearing roll calls, locking the call, setting up passwords to join and more. But don’t worry about all the features turning your next call into another three-way calling fiasco. The features are easy to use and are just the icing on the cake. Conference Central is an effective, easy and affordable way to manage your multi-participant calls.
And if you never have to accidentally hang up on an important person (your boss, your largest client), isn’t it worth it.
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