By now you probably know that recording is an important feature of phone and web conferencing. You can create a great recording of any live conference by simply pressing “record” when you start a meeting or event.
But what you may not know is that the recording feature should be considered a necessity, not just an option! There are so many ways in which conference recordings can assist and improve your business.
Here’s how and why you should start using the recording feature to your full advantage.
1. Create convenience
Conference call recordings provide convenience for both your business and your attendees. You will always have people who were supposed to be or wanted to be included in a conference but couldn’t make it. Offering up a recording after the conference is over allows those who missed it to catch up, on demand.
It’s convenient for you, too, because you don’t have to spend separate time and resources to catch someone up on what they missed, or even reschedule or repeat a conference. Offering more options and convenience to your customers also speaks highly of your company, which can be an invaluable boost to your reputation.
The same recording can also conveniently double as a tool for sales, security, recordkeeping, and more, as we’ll see below.
2. Keep better records
Recording a web or phone conference simply allows for better recordkeeping. It’s impossible to take perfect notes in a busy conference with many speakers, or when there are visual elements in a web conference that can’t be captured or returned to once they pass by.
For a business, a recording means getting a permanent and complete record of any conference. It takes the guesswork out of referring back to any of the content or trying to recall specific wording. You can easily return to an audio or video file to hear what someone said verbatim. You can also archive the recordings and keep them organized for later use, whether through your conferencing service, your website, or your own local hard drive.
For attendees who wished they could have had a “rewind” button during the live conference, the recording allows them to revisit elements they may have missed. They can keep referring back to that resource as long as it’s available to them from the host.
3. Get a larger audience
Offering an on-demand recording in addition to your live conference expands your potential audience infinitely. This is essential to those events for which you want to reach as many people as possible.
All phone and web conferencing providers have limits on how many people can attend your live call, which might depend on the service package you’ve chosen and can afford. Naturally, there are also limits to how many people can attend on a particular date and time based on their availability.
But the recording feature, which often comes free with the rest of your service, widens that audience significantly if you offer the recording to a wider public online. You reach more people with half the work and virtually no extra expense.
4. Back up securely
Recording a conference is an easy way to make sure to back up all the information contained in a conference—using a simple feature within the conferencing service itself. And it’s effortless, because it’s occurring simultaneously with your live call and then saved immediately to your computer.
The recording saves as a standard audio or video file that you can store wherever you wish. You can then quickly zip files up and whisk them off to an external hard drive if you want, or have them backed up by whatever service you already have in place.
It offers significant peace of mind to know that a recording is taking place in the background to catch whatever valuable information happens on your call. You don’t risk losing anything if you always record.
5. See better payoff
Conference recordings offer more value to your business, in multiple ways. For one, you get more cost mileage out of the conferences you’ve already done, as they are available to customers indefinitely as recordings. This potentially reduces the time and cost needed to create new content more frequently.
Having recordings continuously available online also offers greater return on investment. Available recordings can generate new leads for your business each day just by sitting there on your website. You can also offer them up in unique ways to drive further engagement or monetary gain.
For instance, you could offer recordings as a feature that requires paid access. Or, your best conference recordings could be a free gift for subscribing to a service or upgrading. Get creative with how your recordings can offer even more value to you and more incentive to your customers.
6. Create dynamic training material
Using web conferencing for educational purposes can be invaluable, as you are able to teach or train individuals with an array of elements through presentations, file sharing, screen sharing, etc. Recording conferences for training means you can redistribute the same information to whoever needs to learn it, without having to re-do a class or training session over and over.
This is not only useful for internal training in your company, but for customer service as well. You can create and record conferences that lay out the features of your service or explain how things work. You can then make these recordings available on your website for new clients to learn about their new product or service and old clients to revisit whenever they like.
Sometimes you may not even intend for a conference to turn into training material. Say you’re web conferencing with a client to address some questions they have, and it turns into a really great general how-to video or troubleshooting guide. Recording makes it so you can share that valuable material with your whole client base or other employees, eliminating the need to create separate content for that purpose.
7. Simplify the hiring process
Though you may not have thought about it before, conference recording can make the work of your HR department a lot easier and employee transitions much smoother.
Your hiring staff can conduct interviews via video conference, as many do when a prospect can’t meet face-to-face. This allows both parties to see and hear one another easily as they ask and answer questions, as well as share necessary documents like resumes, contracts, etc.
If the interviewer records each interview conference, he or she can simply forward a standout interview to anyone in the office who needs to or is interested in reviewing the candidate before hiring. This can help speed up the hiring process by making it easier to review and compare candidates, and potentially eliminate the extra time and expense of additional interviews.
8. Improve sales and marketing
Conference recordings have other valuable uses for sales and marketing that you may not expect. You can actually skip distributing a live conference, and simply use the tools of your web conferencing platform to create and record promotional material in unique ways.
Maybe you record a rich sales pitch or marketing presentation using the audio, screen sharing, and video features of a web conferencing service. Then you can quickly provide the information about your business or a new product to any prospects. It quickly provides an engaging and complete pitch that a simple phone call or standard presentation cannot.
This is a great way of making your web conferencing service do even more for you, without the expense of further software or technology. It’s an easy and convenient way to present information with a service you’re already familiar with, but which people often don’t even think to take full advantage of in this way.
9. Make conferences better
Finally, recorded conferences allow for future conferences to improve in quality. This is because a business can go back and review their history of output, determine what isn’t working, and figure out what to change on the next live call.
Looking back at past conferences also helps to prevent repeat material, or can prompt further discussion of a past topic in a future call or webinar. You can even watch or listen to recorded conferences from other companies in your industry to find out what techniques are working for them that you might implement yourself.
This valuable hindsight could be what transforms your small webinar into a widespread public success, or your simple business presentation into something that makes more and more customers want to buy in to your brand. Conferencing can and should be something you are always improving at.
Conclusion
We hope this has given you plenty of reason to start recording your web and phone conferences—and provided you some new ways of using them if you already do so. Feel free to reach out to us to learn more about the recording features of our services here at Conference Calls Unlimited, and to start using your conference call recordings to do great business!
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