Forbes has noted that the world’s march towards cheaper and easily available video conferencing hardware is right around the corner. As technology begins to continue its inexorable trek towards this point, everyday video conferencing items are beginning to decrease in price. This is a positive move for small to medium enterprises, since they may not have the same level of budget to use as their multinational counterparts. Multi-platform conferencing solutions such as Blue Jeans Video Conferencing are making it much easier for small and medium businesses to get into the game of video conferencing for meetings and even interviews. There are number of ways that low cost, high quality video conferencing can benefit a business, such as:
Efficiency
Face to face meetings can be very time consuming. Harman International estimated that on average the average length of a business trip for their employees would come in at around 1.3 days. For any company, spending time travelling counts as time wasted. To facilitate meetings, low-cost solutions can substitute for face to face meetings. The level of interaction is very close to being at the location in person and so does not feel as detached as video conferencing used to feel in the past. Low cost solutions can utilize high quality video to produce the best results on any type of hardware. The benefit to the company is that the employee in question doesn’t have to expend days travelling and that time can go towards production instead of being in transit to a meeting that can happen just as well over a video conferencing screen.
Presentation of Visual Information
One of the things that face to face meetings have going for them is that they make it easy to present relevant information to a group of people located right there and getting real-time feedback from them. Video conferencing has managed to bridge this gap as well, producing high quality shareable slides that can be stored on a cloud for easy access by all participants. Graphs and charts are similarly easily shareable and communication can continue unabated. The benefit of this to a business is that it enables decisions to be made immediately. Human beings have a distinct mental separation between written and spoken words. Many times the gist of a conversation can be lost in translation moving from email to speech. Low-cost video conferencing enables employees and managers alike to speak to each other, ensuring that this does not occur.
Profit Margin
In any business, the bottom line is always a concern to the owners. Implementing a low cost video conferencing solution that can give you the same performance as a high cost one sounds too good to be true. However, because the low cost solution doesn’t monopolize as much money as a more expensive system would, the profit margin at the end of the year would be significantly higher. The low cost system pays for itself in a much shorter length of time than a higher cost system would. However, low cost systems have the problem of being notoriously low quality with their transmission. Due to the fact that they utilize public networks, they tend to get bogged down. Latest technology has managed to significantly address these problems. High speed, low latency internet has made the public realm more than able to support the functions of low cost, high quality video, as is evidenced by such companies as Skype. The result is a video conferencing system that is not only affordable but almost as good as systems that multinational corporations run.
Information Distribution
Video Conferencing is usually a two-way exchange of ideas, but sometimes you only need information to get from one location to another. In the past, this required the use of costly services like Fed Ex to get packages containing data from one point to another. Overnight was the best speed you could hope for. However, with the use of low-cost video conferencing software, you can easily send files from one location to another avoiding both the cost and the hassle and speeding up the decision making process a hundredfold. Recently Cisco implemented this for the UK Department of Health and it resulted in a massive increase in productivity and cut down operating costs by a large margin.
Low cost video conferencing such as that offered by Blue Jeans Video Conferencing makes a very convincing argument for adopting it in a medium sized business. Interaction is very important to the success of a company. Being able to interact with people over a long distance makes a more streamlined business practice. People tend to be more comfortable working at a place close to their home. Low cost video conferencing software makes it easy to have meetings with them without removing them from that comfortable place. The final result is that your business grows, both from a human resources perspective and a financial one.
