Well, we’d like to help by providing a little guide on the cost of conference calling and what may be happening in your business to drive those charges up. We also want to take a moment to offer a few suggestions as to how you can lower those costs.

The starting point is to determine the nature of your business – do you know if the calls made by the business (I’m rounding everyone up here in to one big lump) are mostly internal or mostly external? If they are mostly internal do you have employees regularly travelling to other countries or employees being relocated for new roles / offices?

Answers of “mostly internal” and “yes they move/relocate” generally lead to the following scenario and a severe hike in call charges;

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Executive A has been located in France for the past 5 years working on a number of projects. He connects to his internal calls via a local French number – one that he’s been able to memorise over time. He sees a new internal role being promoted in Poland and applies. He’s successful and moves to the Polish office to start work. As he gets set up in the new Polish office he is provided with a new mobile phone and new Polish number.

The following week he is required to join an internal team call with his new sub-ordinates. He uses his new Polish mobile and automatically dials the number he has had memorised for years – the number in France! This means he is making an international call from Poland to France to connect to an internal team call.

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We’ve seen that the above scenario is far too common and means call charges are being unnecessarily inflated because employees are connecting via the numbers they can remember rather than the numbers that are most relevant (cheapest).

Just imagine this call from Poland to France costs £0.50 per minute (for ease of maths) and Executive A has 1 internal team call per week for 30 minutes. That’s £15 per week or £780 for the year due to a single weekly call. Now imagine 10 Executives doing exactly the same thing. Now see where your call charges may be coming from?

So what can you do to reduce these charges – there are two things you can do though we’d argue one is likely to be easier than the other; re-condition your employees to memorise new local numbers and stop being lazy or you could find a solution where they don’t have to dial in at all (or use pins) and the call connection automatically happens by using the number most relevant to that particular Exec.

If you like the idea of option number 2 then we’d encourage you to come and talk to us and let us help you reduce the cost of conference calling while at the same time making life easier for your employees.