What is the Real Cost of Free Conferencing Tools?

Nowadays the workforce has become much more mobile making video and voice conferencing tools critical for team communication. At first glance free conferencing solutions can appear as an excellent alternative to paid tools. Often utilizing free conferencing tools is at the expense of reliability and quality.

Low-quality calls can be damaging to a business as they give customers a bad impression. To fully understand the actual benefits of a full-service conference solution first the misconception that conference tools provided for free are of the same quality as paid tools.

The following are four reasons why you need to think twice before utilizing free conferencing tools in your business:

Reduced Functionality

A typical strategy of the providers of free conferencing tools is to provide the least important features and functionality free of charge and charge fees for premium features such as video call options, enterprise authentication, customer service support and additional dial-in lines.

Providers of full service conferencing tools offer all of the features above as well as additional services such as easy calendar integration, on demand playback of recordings, detailed conferencing reports, mobile apps, sub-conferencing for breakout sessions, and speaker identification along with many more services.

These premium additional features help lead to a smoother, much more professional call that helps to improve productivity.

Additional Hidden Costs

Free conference tools are not truly free. The free conferencing calls are hosted utilizing toll numbers which mean all of the participants incur charges when dialing into a conference call.

This does mean that your customers will end up incurring costs to join your calls. These costs can soon mount up if the caller is dialing in from overseas.

The free service providers will also pass on the cost of any additional charges such as taxes to customers. These costs can give a negative impression to your customers of your business and may deter them from doing business with you.

Limited Scalability

As your business develops and your customer base grows, many free conference tools will not be able to keep pace and effectively help you with your communication requirements.

A business owner should utilize a communications provider that can keep pace and develop with them. Providers that can cope with a range of UC solutions, both cloud-based and on-premises are the best choice.

Quality and Technical Support Problems are Frequent

In addition to the many hidden costs and lack of features, the services provided by free conference tools are of a low quality and customer support is lacking. You get what you pay for is very true when it comes to free tools which suffer from service interruptions and low-quality audio connections.

Many free solutions for conferences do not provide a service guarantee or technical support which is vital for businesses requiring reliability. Many paid solutions offer an uptime guarantee, operator support, and crystal clear audio connections.

The free solutions are not an ideal option for a business as a business needs a high-quality solution that shares their professionalism and can grow with them. Going with a paid solution will provide your business with high-quality communication solutions, excellent customer service, service guarantees and reliable service for you and your customers.

Try our free conference calls for one month.