Improve Your Conference Call Effectiveness With the Name Announce Feature

In its early days, teleconferencing industry technology required that Conference Service Providers schedule their customers' conference calls in advance then greet each arriving participant before placing and announcing them onto the conference call. All that changed with the arrival of “Toll Free Reservationless Conference Calling” in the mid-1990s! Conference users can initiate a conference event today at their earliest possible convenience and allow participants to join the event immediately after entering the correct conference code.

We applaud the improved convenience and time saving efficiency of this new advancement. We also have received complaints from conference event moderators who deplore the confusion created when arriving participants have their entry onto the call announced by anonymous entry and exit tones that interrupt the flow of their discussion with questions about who has arrived or left the conference call. Others have shared stories about embarrassing comments made regarding individuals or situations that were made without any awareness that certain participants had joined the conference event!

It is for these reasons that we recommend conference moderators activate the “Name Announce” feature at the start of every conference event. We allow our conference moderators the option of activating this feature via a list of conference commands made available by entering “ * * ” (star star) after the moderator has initiated the conference event. Other CSPs may require the moderator or administrative specialist employee contact the service provider's help desk to activate this feature prior to the start of the conference event.

Once activated, the Name Announce feature allows conference participants the ability to share information with full awareness of the participants connected on the call. It also allows the conference call to operate in a more socially comfortable environment by allowing newly arriving participants to be greeted and welcomed onto the conference event. As reported earlier this “sociability factor” can be a significant contributor to improved decision making and build group consensus.