Video conferencing is a huge boon to business – when it works…

The overwhelming majority of businesses (90 per cent) have reported experiencing challenges when connecting to video conference calls.

This is according to a new survey from StarLeaf, conducted by Vanson Bourne, which featured responses from 500 IT decision-makers and line-of-business leaders in the UK, France, Germany and the US, and from a broad spectrum of private sector enterprises (with over 1,000 employees) with the aim to understand attitudes towards the general use of video conferencing systems.

The data revealed that despite almost two thirds (64 per cent) of enterprises reporting that use of video conferencing in their organisation has increased over the past year, issues around reliability, compatibility, and ease-of-use were contributing towards video conferencing anxieties. Sharing content with other participants is a particularly prominent challenge, where only eight per cent of respondents reported not having any difficulties when it came to sharing information.

Commenting on the findings, William MacDonald, Chief Technology Officer at StarLeaf, said: “The results clearly show that organisations face persistent challenges with the reliability of video conference and collaboration solutions. As another proof point, recent research from the Workforce Institute at Kronos found that only 52 per cent of UK employees believe their personal technology feels more modern and is more user friendly than their workplace technology, which is evidence that the majority of enterprise video conferencing and collaboration solutions are not giving users a positive experience in line with modern technology standards.

“Technology implementation should be about empowering the workforce and helping them to perform their roles more efficiently. Employees want to be able to join a video conference instantly, whether remotely or in a meeting room, whereby the solution enables them to easily and efficiently share their screen or other content with their colleagues. Unfortunately, the reality is that people entering a meeting are being hindered by IT challenges and they are not able to focus on the meeting agenda or instantly share content and collaborate effectively.”

He added: “The ‘always-on economy’ has dramatically transformed work patterns with employees increasingly adhering to the sentiment of ‘work is something I do and not where I go’. With more people operating from home or remotely, traditional ways of collaborating, such as relying on emails or voice calls alone, are no longer sufficient for this growing work trend. Providing intuitive, secure, and interoperable tools immediately resolve the frustrations that many individuals associate with a video conference experience. Cloud-based solutions, in particular, give enterprise users the opportunity to connect, communicate, share, and collaborate in an instant.”