You might enjoy meeting your clients face to face, but in a busy world, that is not always possible. Say your client is a couple. The husband is travelling on business and his wife is housebound with a child, but the market just slipped again and they’re anxious to discuss their portfolio. What do you do?

Welcome to the world of virtual meeting technology. Virtual meetings used to mean expensive, cumbersome video-conferencing equipment bundled with a computer science grad to operate the thing. Today, you can video conference and share slides with multiple parties from your laptop, your tablet or even your smartphone. Advances in technology have made virtual meetings more accessible, but there still are a few things to consider when choosing a virtual meeting product for your practice:

Platform capabilities

The first consideration is the operating platform. Everyone in your office may be using PCs with Internet Explorer, but will the system you choose still work if your client is using Safari on a Mac? Most virtual meeting options are browser-based and, in many cases, also require a downloadable plug-in for your browser or a stand-alone software application. Other options manage with the browser with no downloads at all.

One application, Yugma (www.yugma.com), integrates with Skype, which many people who work online have already.

Given that half the Internet’s traffic now is consumed by smartphone and tablet users, consider mobile platforms, too. Citrix GoToMeeting (www.gotomeeting.com) features mobile apps for iPad and iPhone, Android, Blackberry 10 and Windows tablet users. Truly tech-savvy advisors even can join meetings from an Android smartwatch.

Blue Jeans (www.bluejeans.com) is a particularly mobile-friendly virtual meeting platform that even supports low-bandwidth mode with scaled-back features for those mobile users struggling to connect.

Setup and joining meetings

Your clients may not be tech-savvy, so joining meetings should be easy for them. Cisco Systems Inc.’s WebEx (www.webex.com) features built-in integration with Outlook and with the Mac OS. This feature lets you both schedule and join meetings directly from your calendar application.

Not all of your clients will have a headset ready to handle the audio side of a meeting over the phone, so it’s important to make the process of joining and participating in a meeting as easy as possible. In these instances, a meeting system with a “call me” option that calls participants automatically is a handy tool. WebEx has one of these, but will charge the meeting organizer a per-minute fee for all calls.

Collaboration

Once you’re in the meeting, the feature options become even more important, and the first thing that many users think about to enhance their experience is video. Video certainly is a “nice to have,” although some clients will avoid it.

What’s often more important than video for advisors is the ability to show PowerPoint slides.

This desire is where screen sharing comes in. Most virtual meeting systems let you share your own screen, transmitting what you see to other meeting participants so that you can walk your clients through a presentation as though they were sitting in the same room.

Some of these services, such as Infinite’s Onstream Meetings (www.infiniteconferencing.com) also let you publish PowerPoint or other Office files for consumption by others.

There are a host of potentially useful collaboration features here. Onstream Meetings also allows for immediate annotation of slides, which is useful if a client asks you to draw “what if” scenarios, for example. You also can use the service to transfer files directly to your clients during the meeting.

Recording for posterity

You might have to communicate a lot of complex information during a meeting that your clients may want to access later. So, the ability for them to record the meeting will be valuable.

Most virtual meeting services worth their salt will record a meeting so that clients can play it back online later. Adobe Systems Inc., which cut its teeth in creative digital production, goes a step further, allowing you to edit recorded meetings and stream them afterward.

Adobe’s Connect Meetings starts with a capacity of 100 participants for US$500 per year, so you’ll need a lot of client meetings throughout the year to make purchasing the service worthwhile. A lower-cost, 25-person maximum version is “returning shortly,” according to Adobe.

This capacity issue brings us to another discussion: meeting size. Most of the virtual meeting services described here are useful for small groups and will move easily into 10 or more participants. But there comes a point at which a virtual meeting room’s capacity maxes out.

Webinars

You may want to take the virtual meeting concept further and offer webinars for existing or prospective clients, which can be a great way to grow your business.

Many virtual meeting services will happily expand into webinar offerings. Others, such as Blackboard (www.blackboard.com) come directly from the education market and feature strong annotation and file-sharing features, which translate well to a business environment.

ReadyTalk (www.readytalk.com) is a good example of a webinar system. Supporting potentially thousands of participants, it includes pre- and post- webinar features, including automated reminder emails for meetings, Q&A sessions and poll questions that can be posed directly in the webinar. ReadyTalk also can be used for followup emails and surveys. Webinar subscriptions start at US$119 a month, or you can get into one-off, operator-assisted webinars for a higher fee.

Meeting rooms

You may prefer a simpler, lower-cost approach to virtual meetings. Several services now offer “perpetual virtual video meeting rooms” into which meeting participants can come and go. Google Hangouts (hangouts.google.com) is an example. It offers no frills – just voice and audio – but may work for you.

Further upmarket is Yuuguu, a service that charges US$19 per month for a perpetual meeting room that includes screen sharing. A nice feature of Yuuguu is that you can embed logins directly onto your website, enabling clients to drop directly into meetings by visiting your home page. This feature is useful if you’re hosting a group seminar, for example.

Virtual meeting services can be free, but also can scale into the thousands of dollars, depending on your needs. Thankfully, many services offer a free or low-cost trial so you can experiment with alternatives.

By first deciding what features are important to you, then whittling down the options to a handful of contenders, you can test the technologies internally before picking a winner.

 

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