The recession stresses of recent times have created substantially increased pressure on all corporations. Traditional methods of growing profits through top-line generation are turning out to be challenging, if not impossible to come by. As a result, more and more corporations are looking to ways of increasing productivity through cost reduction.



All aspects of business expenditures are being increasingly scrutinized. Technology is an important component of the cost reduction strategy. The intelligent use of technology to reduce communication and collaboration costs is particularly gaining momentum.

The adoption of new conference calling technologies is one area where this can be seen most dramatically. It used to be true that only large businesses have access to full-featured conference calling services. These services were expensive and in many cases required the assistance of live operators.

Incumbent service providers priced their teleconferencing services at astronomical levels such as twenty to thirty cents per minute. Businesses were required to pay these costs to secure access to quality service. But the forces of competition would soon change that.

The second-generation conference calling services were more efficient. Live help from an operator was not needed. Self scheduling reduced costs for service providers and the savings were passed on to customers.

Third-generation conference calling services have become free. There are now countless companies offering free conference calling services. Simply type the search term "free conference call" into Google and you will see a myriad of offerings.

However, the services are not free in the same sense that oxygen is free. Rather, a telephone call is required to be made to access the service and users will pay whatever the charge is associated with making that call. For individuals with flat rate plans, there will be no additional charge to use such a service.

The fact that these companies offer free services does not mean that the teleconferencing options are bare-bones. To the contrary, a number offer a variety of useful features. Audio recording is one such service and many offer premium features such as toll-free access at discounted rates.

Fuel prices may be lower today than they were in recent years; however travel remains an expensive option for many businesses. The actual costs of air travel, auto rental and the like are only part of the expense associated with travel. The opportunity cost of time spent away from the office is also a critical factor.

It is for that very reason that free conference calling can become a critical enabling factor in increasing business productivity. A San Francisco-based sales executive with clients in Denver, Colorado can generate three to five times the productivity by replacing just one trip a month to Denver with free conferencing.

In addition, companies involved in complex marketing can unite disparate individuals across locations on one conference to leverage expertise. Clients, in turn, can get faster access to that expertise through the use of conferencing.

Conference calls also offer the benefit of including parties that otherwise may be unable to travel on account of extreme location variation. Today's multinational corporations are increasingly likely to have team members located in Asia as well as North America and Europe. Conference calling enables these individuals to gather in one virtual forum.

In other words, the productivity benefits of conferencing don't just come from reducing direct and indirect expenditures. The benefits also come from making possible levels of communication and collaboration that previously would have been totally impractical to achieve.

Some companies are also using conferencing as a method of augmenting cooperation among group members situated in the same city. The reason is that today's workforce is increasingly mobile and many employees work from home or satellite offices.

The ability to organize conference calls in these situations can lead to higher levels of cooperation among individuals who would normally see each other in person perhaps once a week. Now it becomes feasible to have regular group communication on a daily or every other day basis.

The economic challenges of internationalization and increased competition are unlikely to abate anytime soon. In the meanwhile, intelligent use of technologies such as free conference calling holds the promise of enabling businesses to reduce expenditures and improve efficiency