Using Conference Calls to Improve Customer Service and Get Things Done

customers won’t have to sit on hold, work their way through a phone tree, or re-tell their entire story to a new CSR

We’ve all encountered the blame game, and it’s frustrating because nothing seems to get accomplished. With multiple service providers or parties involved, the blame game becomes an exercise in frustration. They have an immediate out because the other party is involved and easy to blame.

And, here’s where the frustration sets in: they tell you to call the other party who tells you to call the other party.

Whether you’re a consumer, an internal customer, or a business manager who wants to improve customer service, conference calls can play an important role in stopping the blame game and getting things done.

How US and Canada Individuals Can Use Conference Calls to Solve Problems

As a consumer facing an issue that likely involves more than one party, you could use our pay-as-you-go conference calling plan to initiate your first phone call to the main party. As soon as the customer service representative tells you that you will need to call some other party, such as a hardware manufacturer, you can let them know that you will be doing just that — but by joining that person to the existing call.

Our USA and Canada conferencing plans make it easy to stay within the existing conference and then join a new person into it. You can use this same strategy within your organization when trying to get to the bottom of an issue.

By bringing everyone involved together into a group audio call, the blame game becomes much more difficult and you, the customer, should have a better customer service experience as a result.

How US and Canada Organizations Can Use Conference Calls to Improve Their Own Customer Service

Ideally, however, customers should not need to take matters into their own hands. If you want to improve customer service within your own organization, empowering your customer service team with USA and Canada conference calling services can help. As needed, they can schedule conference calls with all of the parties involved.

Instead of passing the blame to the other party, which may or may not be the case, your CSRs can stay involved to make sure that the customer ends up speaking to the correct person whether within your organization or externally. We provide local and toll free access numbers for locations across USA and Canada as well as allow the call’s moderator to manually join individuals to conference calls on demand.

For example, if a CSR determines that multiple parties need to be consulted in order to resolve the customer’s problem, he or she could ask the customer for about 5 to 10 minutes to gather the appropriate representatives from the various companies into a group audio call. The CSR could then ask for the customer’s call back number and manually join the customer into the conference call once all participants have joined.

With this approach, customers won’t have to sit on hold, work their way through a phone tree, or re-tell their entire story to a new CSR. Meanwhile, the customer’s problem can be worked through in a much more expedient manner.

Are you using USA or Canada conference calls to solve customer problems? Give our pay-as-you-go conference calling service a try today.

View details about using Canada & US conferencing here

Why Use the Live Conference Viewer When Hosting a Canada Conference Call?

The live conference viewer is a free, advanced feature of our pay-as-you-go Canada conference calling service.

Toronto Canada SkyscraperOur toll free and local access Canada conference calling service is a pay-as-you-go service that includes several advanced features, one of which is the Live Conference Viewer.

 

 

Included are local access numbers for your
participants in these provinces:

Toronto
Montreal
Vancouver
Quebec
Alberta
Ottawa
Calgary
Halifax

Plus included Canada toll-free number

While you can certainly host and participate in your conference calls without using this tool, you may want to use it when you’re at your desk. Why?

Below are a few of the benefits the live conference viewer offers to conference call moderators.

  • It provides you with a visual representation of attendance — The live conference viewer tallies the number of participants present at any given time, allowing you to know precise attendance numbers. Knowing that 25 out of 27 participants are in the conference room at the scheduled start time, for example, may prompt you to go ahead and start the meeting.
  • You’ll see a detailed attendee list — The names, phone numbers, and other details for each participant are listed, providing you with detailed information as to who is on the call.
  • You’ll have greater control over your entire conference call — Many of the functions available via the live conference viewer are available via keypad commands. However, you may find it easier to use a graphical user interface rather than a series of numeric commands.
  • You can quickly and easily record your Canada conference calls — The live conference viewer includes a mechanism for recording your conference calls. Once you’re logged into your live conference, click the “start recording” button.
  • You can silence open phone lines — Most experience conference call participants understand conference call protocol such as muting their phones when not speaking. However, it’s not unheard of for some lines to be left open. When this happens, ambient noise can quickly become distracting to the group. Using the live conference viewer, you can quickly identify — and silence — the offending connection. The line will be muted, and peace and quiet restored to your Canada conference call.
  • You can lock your conference calls — Keep your conversations and Canada conference calls private by using the security lock to lock a call in progress. Once your conference call has been locked, no one can access it — even if they have the access number and PIN.
  • You can break a main conference into sub-conferences — Let’s say you want to host a companywide conference call with employees across Canada, but you’d also like your individual branches to continue the conversation once your core message has been delivered. You can easily break the conference call into sub-conferences with the live conference viewer.
  • You can join and disconnect others to and from a live Canada conference call at any time — Some attendees may not be need for the duration of a conference call. For example, your CFO may be needed only for the last 10 minutes of a 60-minute conference call. Rather than expecting him or her to listen in for 50 minutes, you could use the dial-out feature to connect the individual to the conference call when the time comes. This is also useful when you have guests who should not be privy to the other discussions on your agenda.

Live Conference Viewer

 

 

 

 

 

The live conference viewer is a free, advanced feature of our pay-as-you-go Canada conference calls.

How Affordable are Canada Conference Calls?

Hosting Canada conference calls is one of the most affordable and convenient options available for group communications, especially with local per minute rates as low as 2.9 cents per minute. To give you a better idea about the affordability of holding actual Canada conference calls, we’ve put together a few example scenarios below.

Using Canada Conference Calls for Team Meetings

Imagine having a team of sales managers in cities throughout Canada. By using our audio conferencing service, you could hold team meetings to discuss current projects, sales goals, coaching, and more. How much would such a group audio call cost? Let’s crunch some numbers:

  • 20 minute example length of each conference call
  • 10 attendees using Canada local access at 2.9 cents per minute
  • 5 attendees dialing in with Canada toll free access at 3.9 cents per minute

For a 20 minute Canada conference call with 15 attendees, the total cost would be $9.70

(the call quality is crystal clear with no garbled conversations, voice clipping or drops outs)

Using Canada Conference Calls for Large Teleconferences

Another popular use for Canada conference calls is holding a large teleconference. Let’s say you have a team of 250 sales associates across Canada and would like to deliver a state of the company address along with a brief questions and answers session. In this example, we’ll assume a 30-minute teleconference, attendance of 250 people, and toll free access at 3.9 cents per minute.

How much would such a call cost? $292.50

That’s much more affordable than holding an annual meeting or traveling across the country to visit various branch offices.

Using Canada Conference Calls for Cross-Border Discussions

Here’s one more popular use for Canada conference calls: Canada-USA group audio calls. In this example, let’s say that you need to coordinate a project with several vendors and partners located in both USA and Canada. Conference calling rates for your USA counterparts are even lower than they are in Canada. Thus, our calculations will involve a few more variables. We’ll assume the following:

  • 3 vendors in USA using local access numbers at 1.7 cents per minute
  • 1 partner in USA using toll free access at 2.9 cents per minute
  • 3 partners in Canada using local access numbers at 2.9 cents per minute

For a 30-minute USA-Canada conference call based on the above, you’d incur a total cost of $18.78. It’s a small price to pay to land a lucrative deal or build a successful partnership.

Not only are Canada Conference Calls economical, they’re far less expensive than Bell Canada and convenient for attendees who need local or Canada toll-free access.

With our pay-as-you-go Canada conferencing service, not only can you communicate with a group of people across Canada — or across the border — affordably, hosting these group audio calls is easy. You can do everything needed from your phone’s handset or opt to use our free Live Conference Viewer or free Connect app. Attendees simply dial a local or toll free number and enter the conference PIN. It’s that easy.

Plus, the call quality and reliability of service are outstanding thanks to PSTN fiber optic networks and Avaya conference bridges with triple redundancy. With our pay-as-you-go service, you get advanced features and competitive rates without a contract or long-term commitment.