Your next online meeting can completely change the way you host meetings in the future if you follow one simple rule: press the record button. That’s right—recording calls is a little-known hack for hosting better, more productive calls. But how can something so simple be so powerful and so underappreciated?
Let’s take a closer look at why recording your conference calls is a best practice that every businessman or freelancer should follow. Whether you’re pitching a sale to a new client, connecting with an old one, or hosting the quarterly sales meeting, you need to start recording your meetings with services like Vast Conference. Here’s why.
Determining The Call Quality
It’s difficult to determine whether or not you’ve got a quality conferencing service without listening to the call again. This can help you spot and hopefully troubleshoot issues in the future. Listen back to your meetings. Are they crystal clear? Are the video meetings in HD and easy to see? Are you experiencing frequent interruptions?
Improve Your Process
The best way to improve any process is, of course, to reflect on that process and look for flaws. If you want to host better, more productive meetings, recording them is a must. This will give you the opportunity to find holes in your agendas, figure out who actually listens and participates, and judge correctly how much your meetings are actually accomplishing.
First, take a look at your agenda. Did you follow it during the call? Did you even bring an agenda? If you did, how effective was it at keeping the call on track? Is there anything you can do differently next time? Did everyone understand what was being discussed and get a chance to speak?
Never underestimate the power of a good meeting agenda. Agendas can act as a roadmap during calls, keeping everyone headed in the right direction and preventing the call from descending into chaos. Have you ever been in an online meeting where everyone was talking over each other, nothing was getting done, and you just wanted to go back to your work? We all have. Nothing gets accomplished, and a simple agenda could have changed the entire direction of the call. An agenda can be simple—an email with the plan for your meeting is perfect. Be sure to send it to everyone a day or two before the meeting so they can review it and be ready.
Find Disruptions
You had an agenda, but you just couldn’t figure out why your call didn’t seem to be effective. As it turns out, once you reviewed the recording, Bob from accounting kept disrupting everyone with background noise and side conversation about his new puppy. Yes, Bob, your puppy is adorable—but our meeting wasn’t about pets.
Reviewing your recorded meetings can help you identify disruptions. Maybe there’s a person who’s constantly disrupting the group, but you don’t notice until the review. Or, maybe there’s some other disruption that you failed to identify during the call itself. Whatever the case may be, a quick review will tell you everything you need to know about the efficiency of your meetings.
To Protect Yourself
Sometimes, you need to record things for training purposes or to protect yourself and the company. You might be dealing with sensitive information or a volatile client who is prone to making threats or getting overly upset on the call. It’s good to have a recording to review later on, especially if any legal matters should arise. You can also use the call recording to back up something you said, should a client, supervisor, or co-worker recall the discussion in a different way.
Training new employees might require you to record client calls. The new employee might need to learn how your online meetings work, or get to know clients better through the calls. It’s also a good opportunity to teach others how to conduct successful, productive conference calls and meetings.
Keeping Records
Some companies like to keep detailed records both to protect themselves and just to be thorough. Recording meetings can help detail online calls and conferences, which are a bit different than landline calls. You can record a landline call, but it takes secondary software and possibly hardware, making it more costly. Plus, you can’t save landline calls to the cloud like you can with online conferences, and there are so many more tools to use with online conferencing services. You get more control, greater quality, and a more effective recording capability.
The Bottom Line
You should always record your meetings if you can. The quality, consistency, and productivity of your next meeting might very well depend on a thorough review of your most recent meeting. You can also use recordings for training purposes, record-keeping, and protecting you and the business. Why not hit that record button? It doesn’t cost anything extra, and most conferencing services provide call recording as a standard feature.