Doing business face to face and
collaborating with others has always been an essential part of trade. Whether
you’re brainstorming and sharing ideas with one of your partners, or talking
through a brief with a new client, face to face is always beneficial.
Apart from the fact that things can often
get lost in translation when done by telephone or email, putting the personal
touch into negotiations often goes a long way towards problem solving or
sealing the deal.
Obviously, it’s not always easy, economical
or convenient to travel to meetings, but this doesn’t mean that you can’t do
business face to face. The good news is that modern technology can help to
overcome this obstacle.
VoIP Systems
VoIP – Voice over IP – systems have been
around for some time now. They allow voice communications, multimedia sessions
and face to face real time images to be delivered over the internet.
These include the likes of Skype, which
allow you to make phone calls, or chat face to face using webcams, over the
internet. You can also use this technology to share your screen with someone,
which then allows you to give a training session via the internet, for example,
or talk through something you’ve been working on.
Skype is probably the most commonly used
VoIP system, but there are many others available too, such as UberConference,
all of which will allow you hold a face to face meeting in a straightforward
way without having to travel.
Interactive Conferencing
Other conference technologies take long
distance meetings to another level. Innovations such as the SurfaceHub from Microsoft allow teams to come together face to face,
yet be physically located miles, and even time zones, apart. This type of
technology allows teams in different locations to:
- Instigate meetings at the touch of a button
- Take part in group discussions via the screen
- Show customers or staff how to use a new product of system
- Annotate designs, or add notes to documents
- Play videos, and make notes over the footage
By using wide-angle camera technology and
high-performance microphones, whole teams or groups of participants can take
part in a real-time meeting, where both teamwork and eye contact is possible. What’s
more, at the end of the meeting, any notes made or content created can be
easily saved and emailed to all of the relevant people.
Time to Consider the Possibilities?
Research has revealed that when teams come together to develop ideas and
business is carried out on a face to face basis, the results are significantly
enhanced. If you are looking to expand your business into a global marketplace,
or simply want to make the way you run things more time efficient, why not look
into the technologies available to you? The great news is that many of them are
available on a subscription basis and can be scaled according to your usage
needs, which means no capital outlay and you only have to pay for what you
need.
