Understanding These 6 Things Will Help You Choose The Perfect Video Conferencing Solution

Video conferencing is a powerful tool that makes connecting with clients, business partners, employees, and customers around the globe easily. The technological advancements have contributed to modern ways of how we conduct meetings. Business communication and collaboration whether it is internal or external must help every growing brand to achieve its business goals and must help businesses to meet their evolving requirements.

What is the use of video conferencing?

Video conferencing refers to meetings that are conducted online over the Internet through digital devices like desktops, laptops, smartphones, or embedded webcams. It simplifies business communication by eliminating unnecessary travel and other confusions that might arise in a face-face meeting. Many businesses leverage video conferencing on a daily basis to attain a competitive advantage in the industry.

Moreover, there is a significant increase in the adoption of video conferencing solutions during the COVID-19 pandemic, which has increased the work from home culture tremendously increasing the number of people working remotely. With the global video conferencing industry estimated to hit $6.37 billion by 2026, the impact of video conferencing on business is considerably increasing. However, choosing the right business video conferencing solution that meets your requirements is important. Let’s explore deep why it is really important to choose the right video conferencing platforms for your needs and goals.

Before we look into the factors to consider when choosing a video conferencing platform, let’s see what are the benefits of video conferencing.

What are the benefits of video conferencing?

Video conferencing allows businesses to connect with different members and have video meetings simultaneously. It also helps you to connect with people across the globe on cross platforms as well. Now let’s look into the other benefits of video conferencing.

Enhanced productivity

With video conferencing, you can reduce hectic business-related travel and cut down the costs related to it as well. This helps your team to improve their productive time by investing their time and efforts in other important areas of the business. Improved productivity helps projects to get completed quickly and helps your business to align with the meeting goals.

Better business relations

Just like face-face meetings, video meetings help you to communicate with your colleagues, employees, clients, or customers to facilitate improved business relations and create lucrative opportunities for your business. Using video conferencing, you can hold board meetings, catch up with your employees, conduct webinars, train your team members, and exchange smart business ideas.

Empower the global workforce

Video conferencing solutions allow you to build a collaborative meeting culture in your organization and equip the global workforce. It allows teams to create real-time connections regardless of their geographical location which improves the ability of team members to collaborate globally.

Simplifies business management

In a corporate space, the need for team members to communicate and collaborate together is relatively high. Teams might have to conduct online video meetings, chat in real-time, share, and record screens to stay connected with each other. However, using different solutions to power each of these individual functions can be challenging. A video conferencing solution helps your business to simplify operations instead of being overloaded with different services for overall business management.

Communicate with a large global team

One of the main benefits of video conferencing is to help team members to connect with each other regardless of their physical location. While not all video conferencing solutions allow businesses to conduct meetings with teams of large size, some apps like Zoom offer this facility. When you choose a business video conferencing solution, choose the solutions that allow you to accommodate a large number of people if you plan to hold key business meetings with more team members.

Efficient scalability of business

Gone are the earlier times where organizations had to buy costly set up for video conferencing. Today’s modern technology allows businesses to facilitate 4k quality video meetings for an affordable price. Best solutions also allow businesses to conduct video meetings more efficiently and effortlessly than ever before.

Select a video conferencing solution that is scalable and allows you to accommodate a large number of team members in online meetings. Brands that communicate by using video conferencing solutions allow them to share information efficiently and in a faster way.

Essential factors to look for when selecting the video conferencing platform

Considering the importance of video conferencing in business communication, you need the best video conferencing solution to power your online meeting. For both small and large businesses, free video conferencing tools can be an obvious solution, but these tools come with plenty of limitations when it comes to running more formal video conferences.

Business video conferencing solutions for running professional online meetings operate efficiently for conferences with a bigger audience and the ability to host separate videos or split-screen participants at once making it an ideal choice for businesses looking for a more sophisticated video conferencing setup.

Here are some of the important factors to consider when choosing a video conferencing solution for your business.

Ease of use

One of the main video conferencing characteristics you need to look for in a video conferencing platform is a simple and user-friendly interface. Never let a complicated user interface hold your business operations back. If you are not using a user-friendly video conferencing solution, you will start presentations without the essential tools causing your meetings to have long delays and interruptions as participants struggle to turn their audio and video feeds on, or share their screen.

The video conferencing platform you use must also be easy to set up and configure with little or no technical assistance.

Number of participants

Are you planning to conduct video conferencing with members on a one-one basis or including your entire team in the meeting? You must also consider whether or not you will be communicating with a single party or different parties at a time in different locations. Essentially, the number of members attending your video meeting is one of the fundamental aspects that you need to focus on.

Have a look at the number of expected participants, their location, and the devices they would be using to ensure that the whole setup runs smoothly. This will greatly depend on the size of your business. Large businesses probably need a more secure video conferencing platform to handle the maximum number of participants, whereas smaller video conferences can use a more simple and streamlined video solution.

The type of meeting

It is a known fact that there is no standard structure for video conferencing. If you are looking for how to set up video conferencing for business, keep in mind that each set is different and aims at achieving different results so it is important to consider the type of meeting when choosing your video conferencing solution. For example, a presentation is drastically different from a Q&A session. While the former demands an uninterrupted flow that allows the presenter to deliver their message without any distraction, the latter requires communication with members and exchange responses. Different video conferencing solutions are capable of offering different functionalities that are suitable for the various scenarios which help to combat some of the challenges that could arise during different types of meeting.

App integration compatibility

Another major feature you need to look at is the app integration compatibility of your video conferencing solution. It can hugely impact the functionality and the effectiveness of the platform for the users you plan to implement it for.

For example, the integration of the video conferencing solution with the office 365 package will help you to easily share, edit, and collaborate on work for a more cohesive sense of teamwork.

Along with the integration of the app, you will also have to look at the device compatibility. Different devices and OS will reach in their own way to the available platforms, so you must make sure the video conferencing solution you choose will work across the devices that you commonly use.

Features

If you ask, what I need to set up video conferencing in a professional way, the most important thing to figure out is to find the features that are essential for your business functioning.

Some brands find the ability to chat important, whereas others would have to record their live sessions for later use.

When it comes to the features, it is important to identify the basic and advanced features you need and the ones you cannot do without. If you want to integrate custom features to power your video meetings, it is recommended to build your own video conference system. This allows you to customize the features you require, both basic and advanced.

Here are some of the features you might have to consider.

Real-time chatting

The ability to chat in real-time is one of the most important features required for video meetings. It significantly reduces interruptions as people can simply type what they are thinking.

Smart meetings

Some video conferencing solutions have artificial intelligence integrated to enhance meeting productivity.

For instance, some video conferencing solutions allow taking notes or sending a summary automatically after the video meeting has ended. The integration of smart technology is also capable of assigning action item tasks to members. All of these features are designed to keep the members more engaged in what is going on.

Background images

Some video conferencing solutions offer the ability to upload custom background images. This makes the meeting environment a fun environment.

Screen sharing and recording

In some cases, it is helpful to save the highlights of the meetings for future use. For the same reason, the video recording feature is important if you need to record the screen during the meeting or review it after the meeting ends.

Keeping an online archive of old video meetings can be helpful. For instance, you can save snippets of meetings and use it for training purposes for new employees.

Screen sharing is also an important feature to look for as it helps members engaged and makes a video conference more interactive. It helps to explain the finer points of a presentation or show a member how to access certain documents.

Need for multimedia

Supplementary materials are important for the success of any video conferences for conveying your message the right way. Everything from videos, charts, graphs, and infographics integrated to your online presentation would help with effectively conveying your point.

While you can use a projection screen and point the camera to it, but the information might not be clearly seen. The best alternative is to choose a video conference solution that supports the use of multimedia and integration of supplementary materials directly into a video call so that all of the members can receive the information you want to offer.

Overall cost

One of the most important factors to consider is the overall cost of video conferencing solutions and related technologies. Take an estimate of how much you need to send on the solution so you can allocate the budget for it. If you purchase without any prior planning, you might end up paying for something you don’t actually need.

Conclusion

Choosing the best video conferencing platform to suit your unique business requirements and goals can be a challenging task. Considering the plethora of options available in the market to serve different purposes, you must be really careful when shortlisting the solutions. By mapping out your requirements and the problems you expect your video conferencing solution to solve, you can easily find the solutions that suit your needs the best.

If you find a video conferencing solution is right for you, do thorough research to understand the solution in detail, the value it offers for the price you pay. The best way to do this is to avail the free trial offered by the service if they offer one. It comes down to evaluating your requirements for technology and finding what is the best fit for your business. The future of video conferencing is constantly evolving as the technology evolves, it will facilitate a more immersive video conferencing experience.