Bird Technologies’ International Business Soars, With Help from Infinite Conferencing
By Sarah Smith
Bird Technologies Group came to Infinite Conferencing as a company wary of Web conferencing services. Another conferencing service provider had forced the company into a contract they didn’t want, and a hefty fee they didn’t believe they should pay.
“They really upset us,” says Bob Koontz, Director – North American Sales for Bird Technologies Group. “We tried to cancel the service, but we ended up on the hook for about $6,000, and we only used thes ystem twice…We basically ended up splitting the difference, but it left a very bad taste in our mouths.”
The company, based in Solon, Ohio, was started more than 60 years ago when its founder, J. Raymond Bird, developed a way to measure radio frequency power over a feed line. Bird Technologies now manufactures a suite of radio frequency instruments and components and provides products and services for many types of businesses, including wireless, broadcast, government, military, and medical markets.
Bird Technologies has customers and channel partners all over the world—40 percent of its business is international—and it therefore requires a reliable method of communication. So after its bad experience with its first Web conferencing services provider, they still had a strong need for that kind of tool. “I’m the Director of North American Sales for the company and I want to start doing these Web conferences once a month or once every other month to keep us on the top burner with our sales force,” Koontz explains.
He didn’t want to enter the company into another contract, so he began evaluating pay-as-you-go solutions and came across Infinite. “We thought Infinite had the best approach, so we did the trial and it worked well,” he says. “It was a good, sound tool.”
Koontz has tried the service for just a few events, and he and his company are so pleased with it, they plan on using Infinite as their de facto conferencing provider, both externally and internally. He lauds the service’s application-sharing feature, which allows him to show all the attendees of a conference anything from an Excel spreadsheet, to a Web site, to a piece of software used on a Bird Technologies instrument.
Koontz also appreciates the high level of customer service provided by Infinite, citing a recent example where Infinite’s head engineer was able to solve a problem he had on his own computer within a half an hour. His company also decided to use Infinite’s audio conferencing services instead of services offered by the phone company.
The participants on the Bird Technologies conferences are happy with the service as well. Koontz says that in a post-conference survey, the average response on a scale from “terrible” to “great” was that Infinite’s services were rated from OK to Good. He says he’d like to have the ability to integrate a survey like this within the Web conference instead of having to send a form to participants later, but he’s sure that Infinite will “evolve” to this kind of application as it moves forward.
Editor’s Note:
Infinite’s Marketing Department notes that due to customer feedback like Mr. Koontz’s, the Post Conference Satisfaction Survey is already in the plans and will be rolled out later this year.
“It does the job for us,” he says, adding that though it may not have every “bell and whistle,” he’s “much more interested in opening communications out there.”
Overall, Koontz says Infinite’s service is very easy-to-use, and his goal is to have people in the company use it almost as often as they use their phones to communicate around the world. In short, it’s “priced right for the functionality offered,” he says. And after bad experiences in the past, the right tool at the right price, he says, “is really what we need.”
About the Author
Sarah Smith is a contributor to ConferencingNews. Based in Los Angeles, Sarah has reported and written for leading telecommunications and technology publications. She may be reached at sarah.s@betuitive.com.
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