When your car breaks down and you’re stranded, who is the first person you call? Would you rather call your flaky friend or the reliable friend who will drop everything and come and help?  

Regardless of context, reliability has the same meaning.  When vetting the strength of a conferencing provider, especially from the IT perspective, reliability is one of the most important factors in the decision making process.  You’d want the reliable friend versus the flaky friend!

The whitepaper, “Six Steps to Successfully Selecting an Audio and Web Conferencing Provider” provides insight into what should be considered in the selection process:

Free Doesn’t Mean Reliable

Sure, there are free conferencing providers. But SMB’s tend to cobble a bunch of these different technologies together, in an attempt to create a single solution. Often, this doesn’t work as it creates more frustration and higher expenses for the IT team. And because of the nature of “free” many of these services do not come with robust integrations, everyday customer support, and the reliability typically associated with pay services.

Impact to IT Infrastructure

A conferencing service should not overload your system, and cause excess work for your users. It should work virtually anywhere, and support multiple operating systems and browsers, mobile environments and more. Services requiring external downloads and updates can have a negative impact on your users.  

Security

The security of your system is important to both you, and the user.  Make sure that only the correct people have access to your meeting information. Choose a provider that employs multiple layers of security to protect this information with the ability to grant privileges as needed, and secure data centers for storing your content.  

Service Reliability

Don’t forget to consider the uptime of your web conferencing service. Extended and consistent outages are a point of concern. Additionally, consider capacity and bandwidth, as your provider should be able to support a large number of attendees regardless of the time, day or year.

Remember, your reputation is at stake. If you have a service that requires external downloads, is subject to long outages, is difficult for your customers to use, then this will ultimately reflect back on you. Choose a provider that helps you look good…and not someone who you’ll end up apologizing for in the end.

ReadyTalk provides services on all this and much, which you can read in further detail in this whitepaper.

How important is a reliable service to you? Let us know!