Do you spend a lot of time each day managing meetings? If you answered yes, then you should consider investing in meeting management software.
Meeting management software helps companies save time and resources by automating their scheduling processes.
Meetings are inevitable in today’s busy world and as we are in the full force of the digital era. They are essential for effective communication between employees, clients, partners, and other stakeholders. Unfortunately, they also take a lot of time and energy to plan, schedule, and execute.
What Even Is Meeting Management Software?
Meeting Management Software (MMS) is an application that helps you organize meetings, manage attendees, set agendas, track minutes, send out reminders, create reports, and much more.
Using meeting management software enables businesses to streamline the entire process from planning to execution. It saves time and money while improving productivity.
Here Are Some of the Benefits You Can Get from Using MMS:
1. Automate the meetings scheduling process
You can use meeting management software to automate your scheduling process. Instead of manually entering all the details about your upcoming events into an online calendar or spreadsheet, you can simply upload them using the software. This way, you don’t have to worry about forgetting anything.
2. Manage attendees & RSVP’s
Another benefit of meeting management software is its ability to manage attendee lists. With this feature, you can easily add new people to your list as well as update existing ones.
The best meeting management software will also help you set up attendee reminders before important meetings. These reminders can be sent via email, text message, or phone call.
3. Track minutes
With meeting management software, you can keep track of and digitally take notes on what was discussed during every meeting. Tracking meeting minutes is important because new team members, or members of the team who couldn’t make the meeting, now have all the relevant information at their fingertips. They can easily read over these minutes to catch up on what was said or even refer back to them in future instances.
Keeping meeting minutes also means that if an attendee misses something important that is said during the meeting (it happens sometimes), they do not need to panic because they know that they can just read the minutes afterward.
4. Create reports
If you want to know how your business performed over a certain period of time, meeting management software allows you to generate customized reports. You can get detailed information such as attendance rates, average response times, and many others.
Meeting management software can be used by both small and large organizations.
However, it is especially useful for those who run medium-sized businesses. Meeting management software should be used whenever you hold any meeting but specifically when you need to communicate with multiple teams or different stakeholders at once.
5 Meeting Management Tools Worth Using
There are hundreds of different types of meeting management software available on the market. But not all meet the needs of every company. Let’s take a look at some of the different tools available to you:
1. Avoma
Avoma is more than just a meeting management software. Avoma is an AI-powered meeting lifecycle assistant that is with you from start to finish and even after your meeting is over.
It is capable of recording, transcribing, and analyzing your calls and meetings in an attempt to offer actionable insights, thus making your remote meetings actionable and collaborative.
Avoma also helps you improve your meeting attendance by sending out reminders and it helps to improve your meeting preparation by offering automatic and customizable agenda templates. One disadvantage is that it is yet to allow the recording of conversations that happen in person.
There is a free version of Avoma, however, if you wish to have increased functionality then pricing plans start at $20/user/month billed yearly and end at $105/user/month billed yearly. As you move up the pricing plans your meeting management capabilities improve.
2. nTask
nTask is one of the most popular meetings management apps. It has been around since 1998 and currently boasts more than 1 million users. nTask offers features like agenda creation, event tracking, and live chat.
What makes nTask so popular is the fact that it is more than just a meeting management software, it is in fact a project management software. A one-stop solution to many business needs.
A disadvantage of nTask worth mentioning is the fact that many users have struggled to receive adequate and on-time customer support from them.
The basic version of nTask is free. There are two other versions – premium and business. The business version includes the most features and flexibility which is why it is the most expensive option. The price here is $8/user, billed monthly. For the premium version, the price is only $3/user, billed monthly.
3. Calendly
Calendly is another great tool for managing your meetings. Calendly’s goal is to make scheduling meetings easy and effective. They do this by providing a simple interface where you can create events, invite people, set agendas, track responses, and much more.
A major advantage of Calendly is the number of integrations it allows – particularly to various CRM tools such as Salesforce or Pipedrive to Calendly integration.
You can use the Calendly mobile app to schedule meetings directly from your phone. You can also add notes to each meeting as well as share documents.
Calendly allows you to manage your calendar online and offline. One disadvantage of using Calendly is that it lacks the full customization of some other meeting management tools.
There is a free and basic version of Calendly. Otherwise, the pricing for Calendly starts at $8/user/month and reaches $16/user/month. If you require meetings of over 30 people then you will need to contact them and establish a customized pricing plan.
4. Fuze
Fuze is a contact center and communications platform designed specifically for businesses that have conferencing needs – particularly those who are running international conferences.
Fuze provides all the necessary tools to help you organize, run, and manage your team’s activities. With Fuze, you can easily schedule meetings, send emails, and manage tasks.
It has a simple user interface and comes with a wide range of features such as time tracking, task management, file sharing, and much more. One disadvantage of Fuze is that there is no free trial or basic version.
Its pricing plans start at £12/user/month and reach as high as £58/user/month. As the pricing plan price increases, so do the number of countries you can call globally.
5. Lucid Meetings
Lucid Meetings is a cloud-based meeting management solution that offers many useful features. Lucid Meetings is one of the most popular solutions for virtual meetings because of its ease of use and intuitive user interface.
With Lucid Meetings, you can quickly create a new meeting, invite participants, record audio and video, and manage attendees.
A huge advantage of Lucid Meetings is that they have a ‘Meetings School’ where you can complete training courses and transformative programs to help you get the most out of the Lucid Meeting software.
There is no free version of Lucid Meetings. Pricing starts at $12.50/user for small teams and can reach as high as $249/month for larger enterprises.
How Do You Know Which Meeting Management Software Is the One for You?
In order to know which meeting management software is right for you and your business, you need to understand which meeting features are most important and what features you will then require from the software.
Determining the needs and processes of a meeting is step one to choosing a meeting management software. Without this knowledge, you may end up with an expensive piece of technology that does not even meet your requirements.
But how do you know this?
Here are some actionable tips for working out the components of your meetings and the features your meeting management software will need:
1. Track the meeting process touchpoints
You need to ensure that the software you choose covers all of the touchpoints along your meeting process. This includes scheduling, recording, managing participants, and communicating with attendees.
The best meeting management software should be able to handle all of these processes seamlessly. It should not matter if you’re in an office or a conference room.
2. Log all the meeting pain points
Identifying the issues that you are having during your meeting lifecycle is one way of identifying the features you need your software to have. The software needs to account for all of these pain points but also be flexible enough to accommodate any other potential issues that may arise.
3. Monitor how long your meetings last
Some meeting management software does not have the functionality or the capacity to handle long meetings. If you want to avoid wasting time and money on unnecessary meetings, it is essential that you find software that can handle longer meetings without breaking them down.
It is our suggestion to keep meetings as short and sweet as possible as your attendees will soon lose focus. Time tracking and management during meetings is crucial so that you stick to the agenda and stay on track.
4. Survey your employees
Ask your employees for feedback surrounding their experiences during your meetings and for their opinion on what they believe could be improved about the entire meeting process.
This information can give you a good idea of what features you would like to see included in your meeting management software.
For example, your employees may flag note-taking as an important feature, one that you may not have thought of seeing as you are usually the meeting host.
5. Examine your budget
Budget plays a big role in software choice.
There is no point in looking at expensive software if you cannot afford to maintain the contract on a long-term basis or even a short-term basis. Your meeting management software choice, and subsequent pricing plan, needs to match your budget.
6. Do you need to share your screen?
Screen sharing is a vital meeting component if you are conducting online meetings where not everyone is in the same room.. or maybe even in the same country. Screen sharing allows a person to view the presentation being shown by another while simultaneously viewing notes taken by the presenter.
This is particularly important during virtual onboarding as you need the ability to show your new hires your systems.
7. Take note of how many people are in your meetings
Certain meeting management software has a limit on the number of attendees that can join your meetings.
If you are conducting meetings on a large enterprise scale you need to ensure that it is possible with your software choice.
This is also important as if you have a large number of participants there may be scheduling conflicts that arise, therefore you should make sure that your meeting management software integrates with employee scheduling software.
8. Are there any follow-up tasks?
If there will be tasks that need to be completed post-meeting then choosing a meeting management software that has the ability to create meeting notes and lists with action items is the best way to go.
Another feature worth having is the ability to record meetings – that way attendees can rewatch or relisten to the meeting and remind themselves of what needs to be done.
9. To file share or not to file share
File sharing is an option that many people choose when using meeting management software. This means that files can be shared between participants and stored within the software itself. However, this comes with its own set of problems such as file size limits and privacy concerns.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are many meeting management software tools available, it is all about picking the right one for you.
Meeting management software should be chosen based on how much value it will bring to your business.
It’s also important to understand how well-suited the software is for your specific needs before making a purchase decision.
