Getting GoToMeeting To Go Local

Like many companies we use GoToMeeting for doing remote demonstrations and training for clients and prospects.

One issue we have encountered a couple of times from attendees is the fact that they need to make a long distance call to join the conference call.

After talking with GoToMeeting support and liasing with their support team on twitter, it seems that the number provided for conference calls with GoToMeeting is provided randomnly and there isn't anything you can do to specify what numbers you would like associated to your meeting.

This seems to be a lazy feature that can cause problems. For example, if you are based in a city, like Brisbane, and all your attendees are based in Brisbane, it is likely that GoToMeeting will present a phone number for another state such as NSW. So all attendees and the presenter are making a long distance call.

This has come to the attention to some of our clients, who have then brought it to our attention with comments like: 'You mean we paid for the training and now each of my 10 staff are all on a long distance phone call for the next 2 hours - who's paying for that?!" Ouch & thanks GoToMeeting (not).

Now, as GoToMeeting rightly pointed out when I brought this to their attention, there is no charge for the VOIP option. Well, that is true, but we aren't always presenting to early adopters that have a speaker and microphone. And if they did, they've probably not used it before. The last thing we need to be doing with hot prospects or multiple attendeeds is troubleshooting audio issues. Having a convenient conference call they can join via their phone (not computer) is a feature many business like ourselves need.

If GoToMeeting want their platform to be more widely adopted they need to be thinking about functional improvements that will make it easier for the early majority to attend, and for the sake of GoToMeeting, possibly host webinars in the futre.

But since they don't appear to provide any channel for feature requests we need a work-around. I can't claim credit for figuring this out, but in the course of complaining about this problem to someone they told me this simple solution.

What is it?

Well, as it turns out, it doesn't matter what phone number GoToMeeting gives you when it creates your meeting, you can dial any of their numbers and it will allow attendees to join the conference call in your meeting.

This means you could provide the local number for your attendees and they can call in on that number at a local call rate. This should also work if you have attendees in different locales, you can still give them their local number.

At this stage, I only have 2 numbers, but please feel free to use the comments to provide the local numbers for your area.

Australia
Brisbane: 07 3123 6030
Sydney: 02 8014 4934