10:41am | Now celebrating its ten-year anniversary, Long Beach-based FreeConferenceCall.com (Free Conferencing Corporation) has evolved into the largest privately held conferencing provider in the United States. Owner and founder Dave Erickson says this was accomplished with a commitment to reliability, customer service, and innovation.
Dave Erickson had a simple idea based on the economics of conference calling. While there are normally two components to financing a conference call—the organizer fee charged to the lead caller, and the share of the billing for each long distance call by each person calling in to the conference—he would forgo the organizer fee, making conference calls no different than a regular call. To promote this simple idea, Erickson named his service Free Conference Call.
In October 2001, Erickson began to implement his vision for a telephone conferencing service that would reach out to customers via his website, www.freeconferencecall.com.
Erickson was a one-person operation for over two years in a single office in Long Beach. He had one incoming phone line to answer any customer questions, and it forwarded to his cellphone when he left the office. He had a conferencing bridge, a website, a phone number, and every call was routed through California in those early years.
While he says he occasionally had trouble receiving payment for calls that were made through the large phone companies (who had competing conference calling businesses), the call volume grew slowly but steadily.
The first major milestone in the evolution of the business was achieved in April 2004 when Free Conference Call launched its own network of small and medium-sized telephone company partners. To ensure better customer service and allow himself a break from being on-call 24/7, Erickson opened a call center. This made Free Conference Call the first free conferencing service to provide real-time customer care with live operators. Other best practices he implemented at the time included a toll free number, E-Reports to organizers providing call details, and making recording available free of charge on every conference call.
At the same time, Erickson began to build the backbone of a technologically innovative conferencing service: a voice router. The router is completely digital with no moving parts to break, making it highly reliable and reducing costs further.
Consumers continued to be attracted to Free Conference Call. Acknowledging the company’s visibility and value, presidential candidate John Kerry’s campaign used Free Conference Call to organize his volunteers and political team in 2004.
Innovation continued in the following years, with internal tech support rolled out in 2006. Wyde Voice Communications is the in-house research and development arm, testing and implementing conference bridges, software, and proprietary equipment. These efforts lead to more innovation, including the first 1,000 person reservation-less conference calls.
Free Conference Call continued to scale up through 2008.Throughout this growth, the company maintained its focus on reliability and a positive consumer experience through customer service, tech support, and strong telephone network partners. Innovative offerings included speaker identification during conference calls (“active speaker”), individual line recording for each participant on conference calls, and another first—a web-based dashboard for the organizer to manage various aspects of their conference call.
Free Conference Call continued to gain visibility throughout 2008: both the Obama and McCain presidential campaigns used it to organize and communicate nationwide. At the same time, leaders at companies such as Starbucks and Mary Kay link with their sales and management teams through Free Conference Call’s services, in addition to growing usage by churches and non-profits.
The High Definition (HD) bridge developed by Wyde Voice and installed at Free Conference Call won the VON Innovation Award, while connections with Skype and other Internet providers are launched.
In the last two years, international conference calls have been made available in 15 countries in Europe, Asia and Africa.