Even as few as twenty years ago, nearly all sales took place face-to-face, with the salesperson traveling with clients to close the deal. Increasingly though, as technology continues to change all aspects of business, the sales model has flipped to often take place online. This has made business meetings more accessible, offering more opportunity for collaboration and brainstorming. Web conferencing also means teams can work together over vast distances, with great results.
Web conferencing platforms aren’t new, offering face-to-face interactions that would previously have been impossible. However, fully-integrated meeting platforms allowing full audio and visual collaboration, easy document and image-sharing, archival and retrieval capabilities are key to productive meetings seamless communication. An easy, multi-platform way to share ideas, images and ways of working mean that developing an idea just got faster and more collaborative.
Web meeting platforms are no longer just for people to meet and discuss ideas, but also for those ideas to be captured, recorded, archived and retrieved. DLS sees the importance of a fully integrated solution offering multiple ways of sharing ideas, and are now offering DLS Meeting Room as part of their hosted PBX module and virtual PBX services. There is also a standalone product on the way.
Meeting Room boasts whiteboarding capability, where the images can be downloaded as PDF and shared and saved, optimizing brainstorming. It also offers screen sharing with the ability to run presentations with real-time slide changes. Team members can communicate and comment on presentations announcements and these can be saved to refer to in future. The platform is fully integrated, allowing users to schedule meetings through the hosted PBX, so will pop up on everyone’s calendars. Meeting room doesn’t forget about users without easy access to the web, or slower internet speeds – you can dial into the meeting through any mobile or landline.
Best of all, call recording technology means that conferences, including voice, can be recorded and transcribed, then retrieved easily for future reference. Visual aids, diagrams, and whiteboard brainstorming mean richer and more meaningful interactions and storage means ease of follow-up and a great way to access key takeaways. If someone misses the meeting, they can log in at a time that suits them and view the meeting recording so they can catch up. Meeting transcripts and minutes can also be translated for non-English speaking co-workers.
DLS is also looking to the future with this product. They’re working towards transcribing recorded calls and storing them in a searchable index. This means that if one party mentioned “Christmas” during the call, typing in the search term “Christmas” will pull up that call recording for playback. Even a vague memory of topics covered during a call will be enough to find the transcript!
Leading-edge technology is only as good as the results that come out of it, and offering a way to record, store and refer to ideas and deliverables coming out of meeting and conferences is invaluable-DLS feels this is a key part of unified communications.