It may have only been a 5-year-old-sized headache when Zoom went down for a couple of hours in late August, bringing home-based learning to a halt. But multiply each student Zooming from home by a parent or two.
Throw in all the teachers and school administrators getting worried emails and phone calls from those parents. The individual inconvenience may have been small, but the cumulative time sink easily numbered into the tens of millions of hours.
Whether you’re in education, marketing, engineering or almost any other industry, videoconferencing solutions are no longer bells and whistles; they’re now mission-critical functions. Yet the available options don’t always satisfy. Looking at Gartner’s Peer Insights, for example, shows that even the top customer-rated platforms—Zoom, Cisco Webex, Microsoft Teams, BlueJeans—typically only garner top scores from about 50% of customers.
Perfect videoconferencing is clearly still out of reach. But solutions with the best blend of strengths for your business are certainly available. Let’s talk about some key qualities to look at when selecting videoconferencing platforms.
Availability
Look at reliability data before selecting any app or platform. Depending on your business, you can also redefine availability—does an asynchronous format work for you? What about chat-only or voice only?
Analytics and Reporting
If your videoconferencing is outward-facing, you’ll want to be able to measure engagement. How soon do people drop off calls? What are the video and audio quality like? Look for a videoconferencing system that has native analytics functions.
Security
Security matters for everyone, but some industries are more sensitive than others. If you’re in health care, counseling or finance, look for platforms that incorporate security features such as lobbies and multifactorial authentication.
Every business’s videoconferencing needs will be different. The right combination of hardware, platforms and best practices can make all the difference. Clutch Solutions has two decades of mission-critical expertise in security, networking, analytics and collaboration to bring to bear on this new challenge.
Let’s talk about creating a videoconferencing solution that’s right for you, your team and your customers. Visit our home page today.