Bond Street Capital's Joe Forman says it's hard to read a sheet of paper and listen to someone speak to you at the same time. And in the midst of a training session, competing for attention doesn't make for the best learning environment.
"They're not listening to you because they're reading," says Forman, COO of Bond Street, which has rolled out Web conferencing software from WiredRed Software called e/pop Web Conferencing to get more out of its training programs, particularly as it expands by opening additional centers. Bond Street is a commercial mortgage lender which has expanded to 45 offices nationally. By interacting with potential clients and new business associates in a real-time electronic environment, Bond Street hopes to increase efficiency by making communications clear and easier to access while cutting travel and meeting expense-though that benefit is ultimately secondary to the training improvements. "There are some meetings that we're not doing, but we look at it as more of an enhancement of the experience in terms of managing distributed information and learning about our sales process," says Forman. The company estimates the product has already provided ROI by reducing business travel expense and time. Beyond purchasing a standard Web cam, there was no added expense to deploying the product, which took about five minutes to install. Bond Street installed Web conferencing on a non-dedicated, standard Pentium 4 Server, with 512 K or RAM.
"If you want to have a meeting, I would give you a hyperlink, and everything is pushed to you," says Allen Drennan, a founder and CTO of WiredRed, which has customers in financial services, transportation, government, the military and other industry verticals.
Bond Street is adopting Web conferencing at a time when the investments in the technology are expected to grow from just under $700 million in 2003 to more than $1.4 billion in 2008, according to Wainhouse Research-growth that's even more dramatic when the price compression is taken into consideration. A number of factors are converging to drive adoption across banking and other business lines, most notably a wish to reduce travel cost and the time it takes to communicate between office locations. "It's happening and it's happening in a big way," says Andy Nilssen, senior analyst and partner at Wainhouse.
And the technology itself is being enhanced, with new systems showing an improved ability to hook up with end users such as investors or sales reps. Forman says when Bond Street first started testing Web conferencing, firewall problems often caused annoying disconnects. "It seems to me that we rarely have a problem with that anymore."
WiredRed's architecture works to eliminate the traditional technical hurdles that can prevent communication products from circumnavigating corporate networks and firewalls. Once a user is connected to the real-time routing network, communication with any other computer on that network is possible. The real-time communications stay within the business and are routed securely over the network.
The deployment is also allowing Bond Street to forgo e-mailing long documents to its affiliates-followed by an explanation session over the phone-and instead conduct an electronic meeting that highlights important parts of the document. "You get more bang for the bandwidth buck than you did three years ago," Forman says.
He adds that ease of use is an additional asset. "If I don't use e/pop Web Conferencing for 30 days I don't forget how it works or need to consult a manual to relearn it," he says. "If a product is too complicated to use people will get frustrated, give up and not it at all." Bond Street is also able to record training sessions. "With recording and playback we will be able to store training sessions and simply provide a link where it can be viewed on an as needed basis. We believe this will be an added time saver for us."
Drennan's career background is in financial services, including a stint at ITT, a perch that gave him a perspective on the shortcomings he says many real-time communications systems have. "Networks can be restrictive because of security and regulatory issues," Drennan says.
The competition to bring Web conferencing to businesses is fierce, and WiredRed is trying to stay ahead of the likes of Microsoft by rolling out even more advanced offerings, such as integrating Web conferencing with instant messaging. Forman says the instant messaging option is particularly useful. "It's so important to us...60 percent of internal messages between people and offices are instant messages, as e-mails get clogged with viruses."
But with all of the additions to Web conferencing, there's really no solution that will get rid of meetings entirely, Nilssen says. "There's never a replacement for an in-person meeting, but for working with partners, or working more globally, or bringing people together to handle a crisis, this stuff can get you a lot closer to your customers," he says.
