What to look for in a video conferencing solution?

01 Apr 2019 | SMB, Voice and Collaboration, Digitalisation | 5-min read

In today’s international business environment, video conferencing tools have become an indispensable part of commercial life. Every day, millions of small business owners rely on these solutions to get face time with team members and customers in different countries and time zones.

By doing so, they realise enormous cost savings on the cost of international travel that would otherwise be required to physically bring participants together. And despite the proliferation of instant messaging collaboration tools, VOIP services, and email, video conferencing is still the closest thing digital solutions can offer to real-life face-to-face encounters.

Choosing a solution that’s powerful enough for the business environment is a must. Here are some key features we recommend evaluating by to make sure that the video conference tool you’re considering is small business-friendly.

When convening video conferences with a large number of participants, you can almost be certain that many will be joining via a smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device.

Business-grade video conference solutions, such as Singtel BizConference, offer users the ability to connect from many different device types and operating systems—in addition to dial-in through video conferencing systems and telephone. BizConference supports a wide range of platforms so it doesn’t require you to use a specific device so you can get up and running no matter what equipment you have at your disposal.

Video conference solutions that can meet the needs of small businesses need to be able to carry high definition (HD) quality video streams in addition to audio. A platform which ensures a strong data connection means that “technical issues” don’t cloud the messages that participants are trying to convey.

The technology behind the conference platform affects how efficiently it uses the available bandwidth to host your meetings. A solution like BizConference uses as low as three megabits per second (Mbps) of bandwidth even for very large meetings. This speed is commonly available, even on mobile devices, meaning HD meetings are possible.

Small businesses frequently have web conference attendance needs that overwhelm what solutions intended for the consumer market provide.

Singtel BizConference is able to offer gallery views of up to 49 participants on a single screen, suitable for presentation on large displays in a professional video conferencing facilities. It can also handle up to 1,000 participants, powerful enough to support larger scale video conferences such as webinars.

Realistically, you probably won't need to host meetings with hundreds of participants but having a solution that can support a meeting of this size in HD means you could consider using it for webinars or to broadcast conferences in the future.

Easy access to recordings of video conferences is a must when key decision-makers are not able to attend live meetups. Uploading can take time. That’s why it’s important that a business video conferencing solution stores recordings directly in the cloud so that recordings are instantaneously accessible to those that need them.

Having a live statistics dashboard and report generation is also important. Technical and usage parameters make it easy to determine if the tool is working and that staff are making good use of it.

If you’ve ever wondered what artificial intelligence (AI) can do for your small business, leveraging the benefit of automatic transcription is one way to find out. BizConference features an AI engine that can automatically create transcripts and subtitles of your recording, a feature that is exclusive to the platform. Need to find out what was said in that meeting? AI-generated minutes can be generated for cloud recordings, meaning that it’s simple to search back through transcripts to pick out mentions of keywords.

Singtel BizConference brings together all these functions in a cost effective solution for small businesses. With a simple interface, it will operate on your current set-up and make it easy to have regular face-time with remote employees, suppliers, partners and customers no matter where they are.