Choosing the Right Solution

Videoconferencing Pros & Cons

Videoconferencing is another communications medium you can add to your toolbox, along with your telephone, cell phone, email, snail mail, and instant messaging. Just as some people prefer email over phone calls, some people prefer videoconferencing over traditional phone calls or conference calls, and some people may not like videoconferencing at all.

Here, we reveal the pros and cons of videoconferencing, so you can begin to consider whether this technology is the right fit for your organization's communication needs.

Videoconferencing benefits
As you may have already guessed, here at Face to Face Live, we're big proponents of videoconferencing, and it's not just because we're trying to sell you a system. The fact is that videoconferencing is a communications tool that delivers several practical advantages, including the following:

• Time savings: Meeting someone in person takes time. You have to pack your stuff, travel, and unpack when you arrive. In addition, you're likely to experience delays – flight delays, traffic jams, and so on. With videoconferencing, you simply flip a switch. The only travel you may have to do is to take a short jaunt down the hall to the videoconference room.
• Increased productivity: Videoconferencing allows participants to do more with less. Salespeople can remain in close contact with prospects and clients; managers can keep in touch with employees; and manufactures can stay in contact with suppliers without spending loads of time traveling from one location to the next.
• Reduced travel expenses: The cost of an average four-day trip between two U.S. cities including plane fare, hotel, rental car, meals, and entertainment averages $3300.00. Travel once a month for a year, and your total bill comes to $39,600! And this doesn't include the added costs of delays, extra meals, flight cancellations, or penalties for rescheduling flights.
• Reduced travel stress: Studies consistently show that people who travel for business on a consistent basis experience more stress, depression, and general illnesses. Staying close to home keeps you healthy, and good health means increased productivity.
• Increased safety: The more you travel, the more likely you will be involved in an accident or expose yourself to becoming the victim of a crime. Videoconferencing keeps you closer to home.
• Improved decision-making: Making the right decisions quickly boosts a company's bottom line, and videoconferencing can facilitate good decision-making. It enables all key personnel to gather, which otherwise may not have been possible due to travel constraints.
• Improved focus and efficiency: Videoconferencing promotes more efficient meetings, keeping participants focused and on track. When participants are together physically, they tend to be less focused, and conversations can begin to wander off topic. A stated objective, a prepared agenda, a meeting monitor, and a conclusive wrap-up can help keep your videoconference on track and on schedule, which is especially important if you're paying an outside service for "conference time."
• Flexibility: When holding a conference is as easy as picking up the phone, you have incredible flexibility in scheduling meetings. Whether you meet with others monthly, weekly, or daily, you simply schedule a time when everyone is free and then flip a switch (or two or three) to meet.
• Convenience: With videoconferencing, you can "travel" to multiple locations and meet a host of colleagues, clients, and personnel without ever stepping out of your office. Salespeople in the pharmaceutical industry are on the leading edge of videoconferencing deployment, because they can meet with their companies, reps, and physicians without spending time driving around and lugging those huge sample cases with them.
• Virtual project management: The facilitation of working as a group can speed up any project. Videoconferencing is a perfect way to coordinate project responsibilities, give updates, manage timeframes, and project completion dates. Another beauty of visual communication is being able to show or demonstrate how something works, illustrate a concept or design, or present a new product or offering.
• Global reach: Wherever you can find broadband, you can use videoconferencing, and given the fact that satellite service is available globally, you can meet with colleagues, staff, and clients located anywhere in the world.
• Stronger relationships: Studies show that "live interaction" via teleconferencing is 80% more effective than phone calls or emails at establishing solid relationships.
• Eco-friendliness: Videoconferencing has the potential to significantly reduce a company's carbon footprint, cutting down on air travel and driving and perhaps even enabling more company personnel to telecommute. If your travel budget is bloated, videoconferencing can help trim that, too.

Caution: To reap these many benefits, you must choose a system that is both simple and reliable. Otherwise, people will never use it.

Videoconferencing drawbacks
Whenever we rattle off the many benefits of videoconferencing, we begin to sound like cheerleaders – our team can do no wrong. The truth, however, is that videoconferencing is not always a perfect solution. In the real world, you may experience several snags, including the following:

• Missing hugs: Nothing will ever replace a real hug or a strong handshake, but people are often willing to make the trade-off for convenience, as long as the videoconferencing solution can create a true sense of connectivity through clarity, body language, and eye contact.
• Unreliability: In its early days, videoconferencing earned a bad reputation primarily because you couldn't count on it to work. Users became so frustrated that they simply dismissed videoconferencing as an option. Newer videoconferencing systems are much more reliable. Reliability boils down to two things – the quality of the hardware and the quality and size of the network. If the hardware and networking are right, reliability is not an issue.
• Delays and latency: No doubt you've experienced phone calls in which you had to wait for the other person to stop talking before you could talk. This is maddening. In the old days of videoconferencing, systems were plagued by these delays and latency periods, because they couldn't handle the huge amounts of audio and video data. The newer videoconferencing systems are much smoother, allowing for more natural discussions in which participants can interrupt one another (even though that's not always polite).
• Cost: Cost itself is rarely a concern when it comes to videoconferencing, because you can use some videoconferencing solutions for free. The true concern is whether you can get a system that meets your needs and fits your budget. Some systems can cost millions of dollars, and if you really need one of these high-priced systems, the cost could become a serious issue.

We can't do anything about the missing hugs. As for the other potential drawbacks, you can significantly reduce and possibly even eliminate them by choosing a high-quality, reliable videoconferencing solution.

Now that you are well aware of the many benefits of videoconferencing and of the handful of limitations, let's take a look at the many ways that companies and organizations use videoconferencing to meet their communications needs in the next lesson, "Exploring Real World Applications."