Top Tips for Better Audio Calls

Our customers frequently ask for tips to help make their audio conference calls more effective. It isn’t hard and keeping a few best practices in mind will help make the difference between feeling productive and like you just wasted 30 minutes of your time.

Before the Call

• Stay organized and be prepared for your conference call.
• Notify your participants of the date and time of the call. (Have you downloaded InterCall’s Outlook® plug-in to make scheduling your meetings easy by automatically including your conference account details in the calendar invite?)
• Communicate any items that need to be prepared prior to the meeting.
• Send the agenda to your participants.
• Log into InterCall Online to adjust any settings on your account. For instance, if you will have a lot of people in your meeting, you can turn on silent entry so you do not hear continuous beeping as participants join or drop off.
• If you are traveling, download InterCall Mobile Assistant so your account info is stored in your smartphone and you aren’t fumbling for your codes.

Starting the Call

• Be on time or early to your call.
• Have the phone commands easily accessible so you can utilize all of the conference features. These are listed on the back of your wallet card or you can download a quick reference guide.
• Be sure you are in a quiet location where you will not be disturbed and try to minimize background noise.
• Turn off call waiting, pagers and cell phones.
• Conduct a roll call so you know who is there.
• Briefly state the goals of your meeting and the agenda.
• Do not put your phone on hold as this may put music into the conference and prevent others from continuing the meeting.
• If you're recording your meeting, let everyone know before you press *2 on your phone keypad.

During the Call

• Keep your conference on track by engaging your participants and keeping them informed of upcoming tasks and meetings.
• Say your name before you speak and encourage others to do the same. It is easy to forget that everyone on the call may not be familiar with all the voices.
• Ask for feedback from specific participants instead of the entire group. You're more likely to get a response instead of silence while everyone waits for someone else to answer.
• Table any discussions that are not relevant to the agenda for a later time and place.
• Try to involve all of the participants in the discussion.
• Promptly deal with any noise or distractions by pressing *0 to request an operator.
• Summarize the issues discussed and recap any action items resulting from the call.
• Establish the day and time for the next conference call.

I hope this helps you to host better meetings so you get more out of them. Have you found other things that make your calls run more smoothly? We’d love to share some more ideas with our users.

Come back next week and I’ll give you some suggestions for improving your line quality.

Christina Todisco is a marketing manager at InterCall and has been in the conferencing industry since 2002. Christina currently provides product marketing support for InterCall’s audio services, reporting and invoice solutions and InterCall Online. When not working, Christina enjoys spending time with her husband, daughter, family and friends.

Losing Control of Your Conference Calls?

Last week, I was attending an important quarterly conference call with several of my co-workers. I was trying to listen closely and take notes, but the sound of heavy breathing was coming through one of the audio lines. I couldn’t concentrate and my frustration started to quickly grow. I could tell I wasn’t the only one who felt this way, as I could also hear the tension in the speaker’s voice. Luckily for us, we were using our proprietary web conferencing platform, InterCall Unified Meeting®  to host the call. Audio integration with InterCall Unified Meeting allowed the moderator to easily identify the culpri t and quickly mute his line via the active speaker icon. The call continued to move forward with no further interruptions.

Whether it’s the heavy breather, the food chewer, the barking dog, the screaming child, of the fire truck driving by, these annoying distractions can quickly spiral a conference call out of control. Unproductive conference calls, such as this hilarious video depicts, can waste a significant amount of time getting everyone's attention and making sure they're all on the same page. Most times, the trick is just a matter of showing someone what you are talking about so there's less confusion, less distraction and everyone is following along with you. Had the star of the video, Dave Grady, been using InterCall's easy-to-use online meeting solutions, he could have controlled the flow of his meeting from the very beginning.

Control your audio conference calls

Dial-out to participants and even mute lines to keep Sparky and the kids at bay and other distractions away.

Share, present and collaborate

Show presentations, applications or your entire desktop and keep all eyes on the same page for faster decision making.

Run meetings from the road

Free mobile apps for your Android^TM phone, Blackberry® or iPhone® allow you to run your online conferences anytime, from anywhere so you can see and share key documents - even on the go.

Schedule and start meetings in just a few clicks

Starting and running meetings have never been easier with our free Outlook® and Lotus Notes® plug-ins. Just click to schedule, click to start and click to have InterCall Unified Meeting dial you.

I want to hear about your most annoying conference call distractions. Share them at www.intercall.com/beenthere.

Sara Steele is an associate marketing manager at InterCall responsible for various corporate communication initiatives; including social media and channel marketing efforts. Sara began working with InterCall after graduating from the University of Colorado in 2006. In her free time, she enjoys running, skiing, and spending time with family and friends.

In the U.S. Trainers Are People, Not Sneakers

Recently one of my European co-workers came home to New England to visit family that happens to live in the same town I do. As we sat down to dinner with our husbands, she and I started to talk about work. I turned to the husbands to apologize for ‘talking shop’. Her husband gave me a puzzled look and asked, “What does it mean to ‘talk shop’?” Fortunately it was easy to explain, but we sometimes forget our slang doesn’t always translate.

Slang aside, even when it comes to the same language, one word can have extremely different meanings. For example, trainers in the UK are sneakers; in the US, trainers are people who instruct/educate others on products, process, procedures, etc. If two English speaking cultures can have such different meanings of a word, imagine what could happen with someone who inadvertently mistranslates a phrase or word into another language.

Here are some tips on how to prevent your meeting from getting lost in translation.

1. Speak slowly and clearly. Folks like me in the northeast region of the U.S. have a tendency to talk fast, which isn’t very helpful when those listening are trying to process English into another language.
2. Reinforce what you say with visuals. Using an online meeting solution like InterCall Unified Meeting lets you show or share documents/PowerPoint slides from your computer. At times, it is easier to understand English when reading it vs. only hearing it.
3. Take a breath. Don’t ramble on for 20 minutes at a stretch. Information is easier to process in smaller sections with opportunities for participants to ask questions/clarify points.
4. Allow questions to be asked via chat. Let participants use the online chat feature to type their questions or comments to you. It is sometimes easier to write in English than to speak it.
5. Consider time zones. Schedule meetings with people located in other regions at the start of their day. Yes this may mean a late night for you, but it makes it easier on those who have to translate English into another language.
6. Make sure to record the meeting and have it available to your participants. With a solution like InterCall Unified Meeting, audio and web visuals are included in the synchronized recording that can be paused and rewound during playback. At no extra cost, participants can play it back as many times as they need to ensure they understand what is being communicated.

What other tips do you have for using web conferencing to help with multiple language communications?

Sarah Murphy is a marketing manager at InterCall. With over ten years of experience in the conferencing industry, Sarah has worked with customers and products that cover all segments of conferencing, including traditional operator attended services, video and online meeting solutions.

Using InterCall Online to View, Print and Pay Your Invoice

Shuffling through hundreds of paper invoices, addressing envelopes and writing out checks can be an exhausting and tedious task. Managing your accounts and paying your bills shouldn’t be so difficult, it should be easy.

One of the most frequent questions our customer service team gets is about paying invoices. InterCall Online, our proprietary online account management tool, provides administrators with an on-demand solution to easily manage your InterCall payments.  Below, you will find step-by-step instructions to view, print and pay your invoices all in one stop. The system is designed to accept payments from both electronic checks and credit cards!

VIEW & PRINT YOUR INVOICE

When using InterCall Online, you can view previous billing account invoices in PDF format.

1. After logging into your InterCall Online account, select View Invoices from the left-hand navigation bar.
2. Select the appropriate filter from the Filter By drop-down list (company name, company number, account name or account number) and enter the details in the Criteria field. Note: You can search a partial company or account name by including an asterisk (*) at the end of your entry.
3. Click Filter Search.
4. Select the appropriate account and click on Access Invoices. *Invoices can only be accessed at the account level. Please note: If you have searched by company name or number, you may access the accounts under the company by selecting Drill Down at the bottom of the screen.
5. You will then receive a PDF format of your bill which you can then print or you can pay online.

PAY YOUR INVOICE

Pay one or more invoices online with our enhanced pay online functionality.

1. From the invoice view screen, you can select Pay Online in the top section of the screen.
2.  A list of all outstanding invoices will be provided. Select one or more invoices from the list by checking the box next to the invoice(s).
3. You can then designate the amount that should be paid for each invoice (partial payments are acceptable) and click Continue.
4. Supply your payment information and select Continue.
5. You will be provided a confirmation page so that your transaction can be reviewed before saving. Select Finish to complete your transaction. If modifications are needed, please select Back.

It’s that simple! For more information, you may download an administrator’s guide to reports and invoices or view this Brainshark for additional tips.

Cody Royster is an Analyst Supervisor with our North America Operations team at InterCall. Having worked across the country in our operations, video, web, training, customer service, and sales department, Cody has been dedicated for the past 10 years to help promote, create, and manage InterCall’s conferencing services. He is a loving husband and enjoys photography and hosting dinner parties.

3 Creative Ways to Use Webinar Software to Promote Your Business

You might think of a webinar as a huge event designed to generate leads for your business. You promote your webinar for months leading up to the big day and then rely on experts in event management like the professionals at InterCall to help you organize and host the event. When it's done, you follow up on the leads in a systematic way—again, relying on pros who know best how to guide you using the advanced features of your event management software to help.

Free webinars are powerful lead generation tools, but there are other ways you can use a webinar to grow your business and promote new products and services, too.

1. Press Conferences: Thinking of holding a press conference? In these days of cutbacks, increased workloads and reduced travel budgets, it's not easy to entice media to come to your event. But most writers, editors and bloggers can take an hour out of their day to attend a webinar from their desk. Take advantage of multimedia to make your press conference much more than a talking head. Don't forget to follow up to brainstorm feature story ideas and news segments and to line up interviews.
2. Product Launches: Don't limit your product launch webinar just to the media—why not open it up to consumers with a free webinar showcasing your company's latest and greatest? This is especially useful for niche markets or smaller industries. Our event management software makes it easy to record and archive the presentation, too. You're not just hosting a webinar—you're creating a scalable selling tool.
3. Company Announcements: Have a lot of employees spread across different regional branches? Have some important news to share with them all? Why not save money by hosting a webinar? You'll save on travel expenses, lost productivity and all the other unexpected expenses that come with having employees from different regions gather in a central location. Through the file-sharing and multimedia tools available in our webinar software your announcement will have as much impact as an in-person meeting—maybe more, since no one will be jet lagged.

Cambria Vaccaro is the Senior Director, Marketing Communications and our “Industry News” blogger.  Cambria has been in the conferencing industry for nearly fifteen years, and has seen it evolve from a traditional video bridging service to include cool web features and remote communication services.  She is an avid runner, cook, wife and mother of two gorgeous girls.

That Slide Hurts My Eyes

How many times have you sat through an online presentation and looked at a PowerPoint® slide that has made you say to yourself “That hurts my eyes”? You know the kind of slide I’m talking about, it’s the one the presenter has crammed so much information into that it looks like a Where’s Waldo picture. In some of those pictures it’s hard to find Waldo—same with those slides; it’s hard to find the point.

First off, why do we use slides? Well I can tell you from personal presentation experience, they make the all difference between a smooth and informative speaker vs. a verbal train wreck. However, bad slides can bring down the effectiveness of the smoothest of speakers. So how do you find the balance? Check out this article from Microsoft that discusses creating slides that focus on three core principles:

• Grabbing the audience’s attention
• Clearly communicating information
• Staying in control of the presentation

So now for some fun . . . here's a sample of the best of the worst. What are your top tips for creating engaging and informative PowerPoint presentations?

Who Can’t Use an iPad?

Have you ever thought about how you’d get things done if you couldn’t communicate? You could probably list a whole slew of things that wouldn’t be happening without the Internet, email, your phone or even snail mail.

InterCall’s all about enabling those conversations and we’re committed to offering quality audio conferencing and online meeting solutions, as well as tips and strategies for using those services to more effectively communicate.

We’re using another conversation avenue to get the word out—Twitter. Every day we’re sharing ideas about how to use conferencing to improve communication. Now, you can join the conversation and automatically be entered into a sweepstakes for a chance to win a free iPad!

Here’s how you can enter the sweepstakes:

1. Follow @InterCall on Twitter.
2. Tweet the following message:

I #JoinedTheConversation with @InterCall for a chance to win an iPad! You can too: http://ow.ly/3PC68  See rules: http://ow.ly/3OU13

    3.  You're automatically entered in a sweepstakes for a chance to win a free iPad!

Joining the conversation has never been easier!

Be sure to check out our blog, follow us on Twitter or friend us on Facebook so you can get the latest tips and trends.

Mike Zuccato is the senior Internet marketing manager at InterCall responsible for various online marketing strategy development and ecommerce programs. Mike has over 15 years of online marketing expertise having worked previously in the financial services and media industries. In his free time, he enjoys participating in sports leagues and spending time with his wife and two sons.

You Know Everybody Does It

No not that! I’m talking about multitasking. We all do it. Why? To get more done in less time. Multitasking seems to creep into many parts of our day, from the extreme case of texting while driving to the less hazardous act of getting hair and nails done at the same time while balancing the checkbook. However, multitasking can be more counterproductive because the brain can only focus on one thing at a time.  

One popular opportunity to multitask is during a web meeting. Why do we think that behind the web conferencing “curtain” we are protected from getting caught multitasking? But yet we do it and at times get caught. How many times have you heard someone say, “Sorry, can you repeat that question?” That’s a sure sign of someone doing more than one thing at a time.

Here are my top tips to help minimize multitasking and maximize effectiveness of your web meetings:

1. Make sure the right people are attending the meeting.
   Most web conferencing solutions integrate with your Outlook® or Lotus® Notes Calendars. Not only can you send out your connection details using your calendar but also take the time to state the purpose of the meeting, who is key to the progress of the meeting and why. All this is contained in one meeting request which has a better chance of getting read compared to just another email.
2. Put the agenda up on the screen. 
   Prepare a PowerPoint® slide or application share a document outlining the agenda and goals of the meeting.  This keeps your meeting on track and also alerts your meeting participants to when their key topics will come up for discussion.
3. Do some online polling or surveys to get immediate feedback from your participants.  Keeping them engaged or better yet “on their toes” to make decisions minimizes the chance for their minds to wander to something else.

Lastly, multitasking is a hard habit to break, so to be on the safe side—record those meetings as a back up. You never know who may need a “review” of the information and a recording saves you the time of repeating yourself.

What other tasks are you doing or know others are doing while attending a web meeting? Have you ever been called out?

Sarah Murphy is a marketing manager at InterCall. With over ten years of experience in the conferencing industry, Sarah has worked with customers and products that cover all segments of conferencing, including traditional operator attended services, video and online meeting solutions.

Bluwhath, I Can’t Talk Today – Part 2

In my last blog post, I talked about some techniques to use when you are feeling tongue-tied and just can’t get your mouth moving the way you want it to.

In addition to warming up with tongue twisters, here are two other things you can do to make sure you sound clear and confident in your next meeting.

Proper Breathing Techniques: Breathing from the Diaphragm  (from Susan Berkley)

No matter if you are a public speaker, voice-over artist or anyone who wants to sound their best, proper breathing is key. To help you discover how to breathe for good speaking (and good health), Susan talked with respiratory therapist Peggy Nicholson, a leading expert on proper breathing technique. According to Peggy, to enhance our performance we should breathe deeply from the abdomen or diaphragm, whenever possible. But most people have no idea what this means.

Here's how to find your diaphragm:

1. Place one hand just above your stomach and the other on your upper chest.
2. Purse lips slightly as if to whistle.
3. Exhale slowly through pursed lips while slightly contracting the stomach muscles. It's not necessary to force all the air out.
4. Inhale slowly through the nose.
5. Pause slightly to allow for better oxygen exchange in the lungs.
6. Repeat. Exhalation should be slightly longer than inhalation.

The diaphragm should do at least 80% of the work of breathing. In order for you to get the most out of this muscle, you should practice breathing from the diaphragm several times a day to ensure that you are not breathing superficially from your upper chest.

Complete Word Production Exercises

Improve the clarity of your speech by completing the words below so the final consonant sound really pops at the end.  It might feel like you are exaggerating or speaking artificially at first and that is OK—any change feels odd in the beginning. Practicing a strong final consonant will allow you to use varying degrees of intensity to suit your needs. These exercises are from a wonderful book called The Voice Book by Kate Devore and Starr Cookman. 

stop	bob	ripe	ebb	right	ride
help	tube	keep	stub	concept	load
late	bold	felt	loved	awake	big

Next, practice using the sounds /t, d, l, n/.  When these sounds appear at the beginning of a word, most people form them strongly, so we are going to focus on the middles and ends of words, where people tend to let these sounds slip.

T	beauty	eight	later	bright
D	meadow	divide	tidy	invaded
N	Phoenix	been	sunny	fireman
L	alligator	wall	biologist	feel

Last, practice the following words with final consonant clusters:

act	under	looked	end	raked	kindly
inject	fender	balked	binding	liked	winding
stopped	build	kept	kneeled	slipped	fooled

Put it all together!  Practice the above pronunciation techniques in the following paragraph:

When the sunlight strikes raindrops in the air, they act like a prism and form a rainbow.  The rainbow is a division of white light into many beautiful colors.  These take the shape of a long, round arch, with its path high above, and its two ends apparently beyond the horizon.  There is, according to legend, a boiling pot of gold at one end.  People look, but no one ever finds it.  When a man looks for something beyond his reach, his friends say he is looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. 

Tip! You don’t want to sound like you are over-pronouncing your words when you are speaking naturally but these exercises will bring awareness to complete word production. 

So what do you think? Have you tested these techniques to see if they make a difference for you?  Do you have other suggestions about things you’ve used?

Kate Nelson is a Speech Analyst and works out of the West Point office and is a member of the WP Training team. She works with the North American and Indian call centers and provides speech, voice, and accent modification training for all employees. She is a graduate of Auburn University with a BS in Speech Pathology and Audiology and is a certified Compton P-ESL (Pronouncing English as a Second Language) trainer. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at Auburn University. She is married and has a 5 ½ yr. old son. She is a self-described “word-nerd” and loves music, oenology, studying other languages, and being with her family.

Bluwhath, I Can’t Talk Today – Part 1

Do you ever feel tongue-tied, out of breath or sloppy when you speak?

We all have had those moments, and this feeling can occur at the most inconvenient times—an interview, a conference call, a meeting with clients for the first time. Many psychological factors contribute to feeling tongue-tied:  a case of the nerves, inadequate preparation for a conference call or face-to-face meeting, lack of confidence when you are in a public speaking environment and so on.  No matter what you do, speaking is probably a regular part of your job; we use words everyday and it’s frustrating when those words become obstacles that we can’t seem to overcome. Why is it that you can speak eloquently one day and the next you feel as though each statement takes extra effort? 

Susan Berkley, a well known voice over artist and CEO of The Great Voice Company, is a big believer in the connection between psychology and voice. The two are more intertwined than we realize. We sound the way we feel; something in our voice may give away our emotions or we may stumble, become tongue-tied or draw a blank when a word is on the tip of our tongue.  Luckily, these issues do not affect us every day, but when they do, it’s embarrassing and we hope our audience does not walk away with a bad impression of our speaking abilities. 

Below are some tips on how to avoid becoming tongue-tied:

• Tongue twisters are a GREAT way to warm up the voice and all the muscles you use for speaking (there about 72 of them).  Warming up these muscles, along with practicing clear pronunciation and proper breathing, will help you sound articulate and polished.  
• Proper breathing techniques – these help us relax and are good to practice before that big presentation!  Once you learn how to breathe properly while you’re speaking, you’ll feel more comfortable in your speaking role and your confidence will increase.
• Complete word production (CWP) exercises – these help us articulate each word clearly without over-pronouncing the final sound.  Speech clarity improves greatly when we consistently pronounce final consonants.  Final consonant deletion (FCD) is a quality killer but is an easy mistake to correct. 

Tongue Twisters! 

Let’s start with some tongue twisters.

How can a clam cram in a clean cream can?
The thirty-three thieves thought that they thrilled the throne throughout Thursday.
Can you can a can as a canner can can a can?

Read these for accuracy, not speed.  If you can read them accurately with a fast speech rate then more power to you!  Here’s a link to find more to practice (you can even read them in your native language if it isn’t English): http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/. Bookmark the site and use it before your next big presentation or if you are feeling a little nervous.  Have fun!

Kate Nelson is a Speech Analyst and works out of the West Point office and is a member of the WP Training team. She works with the North American and Indian call centers and provides speech, voice, and accent modification training for all employees. She is a graduate of Auburn University with a BS in Speech Pathology and Audiology and is a certified Compton P-ESL (Pronouncing English as a Second Language) trainer. She is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at Auburn University. She is married and has a 5 ½ yr. old son. She is a self-described “word-nerd” and loves music, oenology, studying other languages, and being with her family.