What is Call Bridging and How to Use it in Your Call Center

Virtual meetings help employees stay connected even if they’re far from each other. One piece of technology that helps make these meetings happen among multiple people is call bridging. In this post, you can learn what a call bridge is and why it’s great to have one in your call center.

What is a Call Bridge?

Conference bridges allow people to join virtual meetings from any location using a phone. Unlike a regular three-way call, conference bridges can support an unlimited number of participants based on your phone system’s capacity.

The invitees can join the call on a device of their choosing just by using a link or a dial-in conference number. Most platforms also allow you to create multiple conference rooms or add as many participants as required, so you can easily schedule simultaneous team meetings for each department within your organization.

If you’ve ever used Zoom before, you’ll be perfectly familiar with this workflow.

How Do You Use a Call Bridge?

Conference calls are one of the most efficient ways to hold meetings. Setting up a conference call bridge is far easier than getting your entire team in one room.

Simply send participants a link to the meeting, which they can join by clicking or after entering a code/password. Another way to use a conference bridge is via a dial-in number that participants can call directly from their desk phone or mobile in order to join the conversation.

This makes it really easy for a large number of people to join a call at once without any complications of joining different rooms or setting up new software.

Why Are Call Bridges More Popular Than Ever?

Nearly 79% of employees believe that virtual meetings are equally or even more productive than in-person ones. What’s more, 7 out of 10 workers find virtual meetings to be less stressful than regular ones and 6 out of 10 claim that it’s easier for them to contribute to an online than an offline discussion, as it’s far less stressful than presenting in person.

Let’s look at the biggest benefits of using call bridges over in-person meetings.

Lower Costs

The costs of team meetings in your office may seem minimal to none. However, there are office rent costs, energy bills, commuting expenses, and supplies, etc., to think about.

Having everyone gathered in the office for a regular meeting actually costs a pretty penny. 

On the other hand, conference bridging requires less time spent on scheduling meetings and less money to gather entire teams together. It works great for remote and distributed teams, as you can hold regular meetings for little to no cost.

Global Workplace Analytics research indicates that companies can save $11k annually per employee by encouraging them to work remotely and participate in online meetings rather than in-person ones. Additionally, your employees can also save quite a bit – on average, $2-5k each year in commuting costs.

Higher Productivity

If properly set up, call bridges can help you, your clients, and employees save a great deal of time. Rather than spending ages organizing, scheduling, and holding a meeting, you can simply invite everyone to join an audio conference at a predetermined hour and date.

As a result, you can hold your meetings anywhere – at home, on the train, or wherever your employees and clients are located. Plus, they don’t need as much time to prepare for online meetings either – simply clicking on the relevant link or dialing a number will enable them to join within minutes, without commuting.

Call bridges are also ideal for dealing with urgent issues.  By simply sending everyone who needs to attend a meeting an invitation link along with a short description of the topic, you can have a quick discussion about the issue without wasting time getting everyone into the office or making multiple calls.

Security

When it comes to in-person meetings, you can be sure that only your employees or partners attend, but what about conference calls? The last thing you want is for someone unauthorized to listen to your business meetings and use the information discussed against you.  

Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about this. Most conference rooms are protected by PIN codes that attendees must provide before entering, and you can even lock the room completely once everyone is in. Your calls are also encrypted, so there’s little chance of anyone being able to listen to your business meetings.

You can also create unique links for each email address that you invite. That way, only the person you want in the call can join. Ensure such business conversations are communicated via a secure email hosting service. By creating these unique links, only the person you want in the call can join.

Eco-friendliness

Turning to conference calls is an excellent way for companies to reduce their carbon footprint when fighting global warming and pollution is an increasingly pressing matter. You may be surprised to hear that if 50% of US workers spent half their time working remotely, greenhouse gas emissions would be reduced similarly to taking the NY State workforce permanently off the road. 

Since conference calls don’t require attendees to travel to the meeting place, these types of calls can also tremendously decrease fuel usage for everyone, on top of saving time. 

Reducing paper consumption is another significant benefit. Agendas, memos, reports, edits, and recommendations can be shared digitally instead of printing them out for each in-person attendee. By not using paper, you save not only money but also energy and effort, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Plenty of Useful Features

Last but not least, you can access a number of call bridge features to make meetings more productive and engaging for the participants. For example, you can choose to record the entire meeting so that you can listen back to it later or share it with people who couldn’t join the call.

File transfer is another useful feature that allows you or your team members to easily share important documents between themselves while on a call, so you can be sure that everyone is on the same page.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many reasons why call bridges are growing in popularity. They save you time and money that would usually be spent dealing with all sorts of organizational issues, and your team can join meetings almost instantly even if they are located far away from the office at any given moment. Call bridges can also save you a great deal of money, improve your relationships with remote workers or foreign clients, and help the environment as well.

Do you feel like you could use call bridging in your business too? Sign up for a free trial with CloudTalk today, as this is just one of the many features we offer!