Continued....
Fortunately, most conference call
services provide a free trial for their services. Many others
provide demos. However, there’s really no substitute for using
a service as you would in an actual business setting.
One thing to be aware of is that
many of the free trial conference calls require that you provide
your credit card information when signing up for the free trial.
They will not charge your card during the free conference call
trial period. However, you then will need to cancel your
subscription before the trial period expires or your card will
be charged for the next billing cycle of the conference call
service. This usually isn’t a problem provided you remember to
cancel the service if you don’t wish to become a long-term
subscriber.
Once subscribed to the free trial
conference call service, you should take advantage of the
opportunity. Put the conference calling service through its
paces. Spend some time on the vendor’s Website learning about
the features of the service. Then recruit some participants from
your organization to help evaluate the service by taking part in
a conference call.
It helps to have a checklist of
the features you want to test out. If the service allows you to
share applications over the Web, then make sure that the
participants are set up for this. Make note of how intuitive the
user interface and instructions for using the service are.
Also observe how responsive the
data stream is, especially if using video as part of the
conferencing service. Of course a great deal depends on the
bandwidth of your connection to the Internet, but the load on
the conferencing service’s servers will also influence
responsiveness. Time of day and demand will also impact throughout.
There
are many consumer products that we are allowed to try
out before purchasing. We test drive cars, we try on
clothing and footwear, and we can even taste small
samples of food at the grocery store. So why not do
the same for conference calling solutions? 
