Top Conference Call Tools to Help You Hold Great Virtual Meetings

Businesses the world over are now having to rethink how they run, rejigging team and client meetings, paperwork and briefings.

With isolation comes transformation.

Lockdown doesn’t have to mean shutdown.

You can keep your business running and communication lines open with your team while everyone is working from home.

As working from home becomes the new norm for many, it’s time to think about how to organise your calls and meetings remotely. Face-to-face meetings, at least for the moment, is just not an option. You can have staff meetings, one-to-ones, presentations and even easily share files.

Here’s a guide to some of the easy and awesome software tools available to hold virtual meetings and all of the other tasks you need:

Zoom

Despite its recent security alerts, Zoom remains one of the most popular tools known by businesses and individuals for providing both one-to-one video calls with anyone worldwide. its call quality and ease of use. Once you set up an account and download the app, it’s pretty straightforward to use, even for the shyest of tech users.

The signal and quality of both voice and video are awesome, making it easy to connect with someone, from wherever you are. Simply set up a meeting room, create a link and a password and — boom — you’re ready to go.

With Zoom, you can get a free plan that hosts up to 100 people in one meeting, with unlimited one-to-one meetings and online support to answer all your questions.

There are other premium packages starting from £11.99 a month that give you video and web conferences, an admin dashboard and hold presentations and meetings for even larger teams and audiences.

Zoom is easy to use and has a great signal from wherever you are, enabling you to have international meetings right from your home office.

There is a Zoom Meetings function, which offers video conferencing and quick messaging, workable across both computer and mobile devices.

Need to share your screen for some quick training? It’s simple and super quick to do and live motions flow well with low disruption.

For those who couldn’t make it, you can record a copy of your meeting, save it in your shared drive to enable others to see it and catch up on what they missed.

Microsoft Teams

A popular choice for many businesses, teams is a natural follow-on for businesses already using and in-sync with Microsoft 365 for their business operations. It blends well with other Microsoft programmes already being used.

Fast, secure and reliable, with Microsoft Teams, you can host online meetings and live events for up to 10,000 people — so plenty of capacity.

Even for a group this big, you’ll still get all of the high-quality audio and visuals as if you were in the same room.

Team Viewer

With millions of happy customers, this tool is handy when you need to collaborate on projects. It’s easy to set up for both team members and for freelancers you might be working with on a project.

Team Viewer can sync with Microsoft Outlook for times when you want to book a meeting and share the date and full details with everyone in the team.

Like other tools, you can do screen-sharing and can also record and save their meeting as a file to share with team members, which saves the pain of writing minutes.

This tool saves busy managers from lots of time and effort and has a great signal from pretty much anywhere.

Go To Meeting

Mobile-friendly, reliable and great for web conferencing, Go To can be used from your laptop, PC or pretty much any type of mobile.

Go To also has extra features that enable users to improve the quality of the video image and sound, which comes in useful.

With this tool, there isn’t a free version and prices start from around $14 per month or you can make an annual payment for a bit less. More features are available with their premium plans.

Google Hangouts

Again, this is Google’s contribution to providing a simple way of connecting and chatting with somebody or having a video meeting. Quickly send messages, view someone’s profile or simply have a call through the app on your phone.

Like the sound of these? Many businesses mix and match and a combination of different tools to help them fulfil different purposes. They may like one tool for video calls and another to provide presentations to large groups. Is that you? Explore some of the options and see how easy it is to incorporate remote working in lots of ways into your business.

Do you have a different tool you use? Feel free to share it in the comments below.