How to Take Advantage of a free Conference Call

by Robert Workman

Published on this site: October 7th, 2006 - See more articles from this month

Some conference providers are bold enough to offer a full service conference call. With the entry of too many of them in the market today, the competition is getting tighter by the minute. The companies who choose to conduct free conference calling may be offering it as a lure for possible customers with the aim to make them become regular customers instead.

Take advantage of a good free web conference calling promotion. This can be a good move, especially if you are not familiar with how conference calls work. Using a free conference call can give you the opportunity to learn how everything works and how you can benefit from, without the associated charges.

A good free conference call should have the following features:

1. Allowance for a large number of callers.
   
   One free conference call provider can accommodate up to a hundred callers at the same time. This is a very large number of callers. Especially if the people you intend to talk to are prospective buyers. For a typical company meeting, a provider offering 20 to 25 participants should be sufficient.
   
   
2. Availability for the call length you want.
   
   Estimate how long your conference call would take. If less than an hour will do for you, then a free service should be adequate. However, if you expect the meeting to last a couple of hours, you should look for a free service that can cover you for a three hours time span. This allows for time for questions and feedback in addition to the main content of the call.
   
   
3. A toll-free dial-in number.
   
   Some free services are generous enough to allow you to use their toll-free number for your conference participants to use. Else, they might be giving you a local number where long-distance telephone charges apply. Check out what the free conference call number is. They might be adding other charges to the participant's telephone bill without you knowing about it.
   
   
4. The availability of access codes.
   
   The provider may indicate that you can have a hundred participants, but provide less conference pass codes than that. Read the fine print--you
   should be able to identify this in the planning stages.

You might wonder if there is a catch with a conference call that is being given away free? The truth is that there could really be one. Therefore, it is up to you, the customer, to find out what the catches are. While some provide truly free service, some free services have numerous conditions that must be met in order to obtain the free service. Be wary of those.

For those companies that claim to give out their service free, may only be doing so for a limited time. If you are really on the lookout for a free service, you should evaluate first the level of service you will obtain, as well as continued availability of the service. You do not want your business impacted by poor choices of free conference service provider.

The bottom line here is that audio conference calls are offered free. It is just a matter of finding and choosing the best provider with which to host your call. You want to ensure that your conference call will go as intended. Remember that if your call is important enough, you may want to go with a paid service, as the level of service and features may be more in line with your needs.

Robert Workman - is the technology editor for http://ConferenceCalling.2byt.com, where you'll find information about internet, web and audio conference calls.