In the age of Zoom, having employees in different areas (of the building, the city, or even the world) is simply no longer the hurdle it used to be. Businesses have long addressed the issue of working together from afar with the business conference call, and this tool remains incredibly useful today. There are times when in-person meetings are impractical or even impossible and video conferencing simply won’t do. All of your employees have telephones at this point, however, and in those cases, it pays for your business to have a conference bridge as part of your business’s phone systems.
What Is A Conference Bridge?
The conference bridge is a piece of equipment for your traditional or VoIP phone system that can answer multiple calls at once and bridge them into a single call, allowing many different callers to all share a digital conference room. This hardware may be something you have in one of your offices or something that you connect to over the internet (that is stored with your VoIP service provider). Your employees don’t need any special equipment to access it, however, even the most basic telephone is fine.
The Value Of Conference Calling
The biggest benefits of conference calls are essentially the same as those of video conferencing – specifically, that employees can connect and collaborate from anywhere, but with conference calling they don’t need special equipment. You won’t have to spend money or lose time with extensive travel, and the system can often create multiple conference rooms for smaller break-out meetings as well. Finally, you know that the call is secure because the system can restrict access using a PIN.
Conference Calling Vs Video Conferencing
While video conferencing has become the norm in times of COVID, there are certainly situations where it is not ideal. You may find that you need to accommodate more callers than a video conference can handle, and a conference bridge will still work – sometimes for hundreds of callers at a time. A conference bridge also allows you to protect employee and client privacy (and protect your positive work environment) when many people are working from home. While most video conferencing platforms usually allow people to turn off the camera, that still draws attention to that person. If everyone is simply a voice in the digital conference room created by the conference bridge, everyone is protected without anyone being called out.