Why You Should Choose a Video Conferencing Tool over Traditional options

In the business world, a proper system of communication is everything. It’s the difference between bureaucratic hell, and being a major disruptor in your industry. By maintaining a clear system of communication and allowing employees to form teams and collaborate to efficiently satisfy your clients’ needs, you can ensure that your company remains the number one choice locally, beating your competitors by offering a superior, timely service. 

In the past, communication was rather simple. Face-to-face meetings, phone calls, fax messages, voicemails, the postal service and handwritten memos – with these at a person’s disposal, things moved slowly – but they moved, which was important in large enterprises and companies. 

How Business Communication Changed

Then the Information Age came about, and we entered an era where data exploded. And it exploded in all directions. With the WWW born in 1989 as per CERN, data moved very quickly, and soon you were able to message people instantaneously – sending mail that didn’t take a week or even a day to send and be received, but just a few minutes. 

Years passed, and the capacity for the Internet and modern computers to facilitate communication in corporate settings reached a point where communication became a race – a question of what business could most efficiently get its employees and workers organized and working constantly and passionately through the use of modern technology. 

Performance data was collected and used to modify corporate rules – videoconferencing supplemented the typical face-to-face meeting, and everything happens through email. Now we’re living the world of corporate social networks, collaboration software, business dashboards, and cloud-based document editing. 

Despite that, many companies persist in the use of older communication tools to facilitate an inefficient business process. But the truth is that today’s video-based collaboration suites are the absolute best options for IT-based B2B companies looking to do the best for their business clientele – so long as they choose a proper provider. Launching a cloud-based video conference for IT businesses speaking to their clients may just sound like something a free service could do, but top-of-the-line providers like BlueJeans aren’t like your run-of-the-mill VOIP solution. 

There’s a large difference between a regular video call, and a proper collaborative video conference with fully-fledged features by today’s standard – and startups and established enterprises alike can make use of these features. 

Today’s Video Conferencing Tools

In the past, a video conferencing solution was more of a physical system than a software installation – or even more drastically, a web-based application. Video conferencing systems had to be installed to the tune of thousands of dollars, with specialized microphones and cameras hooked up to a communicative system that allowed companies to dial up and connect with other system owners to launch a call. 

Video conferencing is as old as the 60s, but it wasn’t fully fleshed out technologically until the 80s and 90s rolled by, and it wasn’t until the early 2000s that VOIP software basically allowed computer users to call other computer users through live streamed audio. Eventually, that evolved into allowing computers with webcams and laptops to call one another while utilizing video. 

But it wasn’t until more recently, in the boom of social networks and cloud-based technology that software providers managed to come up with an even more useful way to help integrate corporate video conferencing into businesses of all sizes, without any sort of infrastructure whatsoever. 

As a result, today’s video conferencing software solutions comes with a list of additional features to help companies get ahead of the competition while differentiating themselves from traditional communication tools, from the phone to virtual help desks and many others. Some of these features include:

• Screen Sharing. Through this feature, companies can help call members easily troubleshoot their problems by showing them exactly, through their own actions, how to deal with tech problems or other issues. Perfect for customer service. 
• Secure File Sharing. Sometimes, in the middle of a meeting, it’s important to share a file or status report. Modern video collaboration systems allow for this – while keeping the file safe and encrypted, to prevent prying eyes. 
• Large Scale Videoconferencing. Nowadays, calls aren’t just taking place between three or four people – but 50, and 100. For when you need a much larger software to handle the size of a thousand-person exclusive webinar or more, you simply can’t work with a free solution and not expect issues to arise. 
• Live Document Editing. Solutions that offer collaboration need to actually facilitate collaboration – and this includes the ability to share and edit documents in real time while in a call. 

These are all for videoconferencing providers to help companies facilitate efficient working conditions. While the travel industry was most concerned about the effects of video conferencing, companies seem to be adopting video calling technology more while still travelling as per usual – suggesting that they’ve been keeping it around for another reason. As per TechTarget, that reason is a significant uptake in productivity – one not present in other traditional tools.