The Conference Coach™

Carolyn Bradfield

InterCall is the largest conferencing company in the world and has been around for almost 20 years.  I should know, because I was one of the founders in 1991.  For the better part of the ‘90’s, InterCall grew revenue the old fashioned way.  They met with companies, articulated a strong value proposition and showed companies how conferencing would improve their business.

As Y2K approached, InterCall implemented a new revenue generation strategy – grow through acquisition.  They snapped up some really great conferencing companies like ECI, Raindance and Genesys.  Revenue and market share grew, despite their lack of attention to the people and customer bases of the companies they acquired.

Now that you’ve spent almost 20 years calling on companies and buying most everybody in the industry, what’s next?  The price per minute has dropped significantly as technology has improved and there are not that many players left to buy.  It seems as if InterCall has created a brilliant new strategy to grow revenue – add fees, minimums and charges to your existing customers and hope they don’t notice.

As we reach out to the marketplace and find an InterCall customer, we often ask them to share their conferencing invoice.  Here are some fun things that we found on quite a few conferencing invoices:

Minimum Call Fee. Have you ever jumped on a conference call only to jump off a minute or two later realizing you got the time wrong….or not everyone is available for the call?  Watch out because InterCall may charge you $15.00 per call as a minimum call fee.  If you were on for a couple of minutes and pay $.10 a minute then what could have been a call that cost under $1.00 will now cost $15!

Invoice Fee. Need your invoice mailed to you?  Get ready to pay $25.00 for that privilege so you can actually pay your bill!

Bridging Fee. This is a 6% fee added to the total cost of the minutes on a conference call.

Post Conference Summary. Want to get an email of your conferencing usage?  This automatically generated report will now cost $25.00!

Telecom Surcharge. Who knows what this is, but it’s on the InterCall bill!

What a brilliant strategy!  A small customer who is paying $.10 a minute can end up with an effective rate per minute with call minimums, fees and charges of just around $1.00 per minute (which we’ve seen).   InterCall has figured out the secret to increasing revenue without ever having to sell another customer or buy a company.  Brilliant!

Say NO to extra, unnecessary fees.  Read more now!