Best practices

Learn the 10 habits of effective conference leaders to successfully conduct your conference calls.

1. Schedule your conference in advance — last minute calls mean less participation from your target audience.
2. Prepare an agenda for your meeting.
3. Send out your agenda and any meeting materials to all participants in advance of the meeting.
4. Kick-off your meeting by introducing yourself, outlining the agenda, and providing the ground rules for your conference, i.e., "This call will be interactive, please ask questions at any time," or "A question and answer session will follow immediately after the presentation."
5. Mute your line to reduce background noise on the conference call. If your phone does not have a mute button, press to mute your line and again to unmute. If you join a conference call from a cellular phone, please mute your phone to eliminate distracting noise and static. Press to mute your cellular phone and again to unmute your phone.
6. Try to avoid using speakerphone. However, if necessary, be sure to use the mute button when not speaking. Sometimes using a speakerphone can diminish the sound quality of your conference call.
7. While on a BT MeetMe call as a chairperson, achieve better sound quality by muting your participants’ lines by pressing . This feature activates presentation mode. To de-activate presentation mode, press , again.
8. NEVER under any circumstance, connect two conference calls together using the “conference” feature on the phone. This creates a condition called "cross-talk" thus degrading the quality of all connected conference calls.
9. Anyone experiencing technical difficulties or sound quality issues should press for assistance and a conferencing coordinator will address their issues without interrupting your call.
10. Speak clearly and pause frequently when delivering complicated material.