1x1 meetings are nice. In some cases, decisions are made by more than two people and we want to invite more attendees to the meeting. This is where Group Meetings come handy.

While group meetings are standard in today's conferencing solutions' landscape, they're a must-have in our vision to become the best conferencing solution for personal business-customer interactions.

We're excited to launch the first step in our Group roadmap - on-demand group meetings.

A brief walk-through meeting mechanics

A brief walk-through meeting mechanics -- In the conferencing world, there are two main types of meeting mechanics: "On-demand" and "Room".

The "on-demand" call mechanics has been invented more than a century ago by Alexander Bell with his phone innovation. This is the exact same mechanics being used today on Whatsapp, Skype, Facetime and your phone:  Someone calls you and you accept or decline the call. If another person calls when you're already in a call, you are given the opportunity to add them to the call (merge) or decline their request.

The other type of meeting mechanics is the "Room" meeting. Think of Zoom and Google Meet: A pre-agreed meeting is scheduled and all participants join with a unique meeting link which sets the room of the meeting. In many cases, there's a waiting lobby as well.

‍

Consolto's Group Meetings are planned in four phases:

1. ✅ Improved on-demand group video experience -- ability to add additional people to the meeting when they click to join from either the widget or the ClickNTalk page.
2. Creation of Group Rooms - creating unique room links where agents and customers can join the meetings.
3. Group chat -- saving the group chats happening during calls
4. ✅ Group scheduling -- enabling appointment scheduling of multiple attendees

At this time, we've launched phase #1 - on demand group meetings. This means then anyone with access to your website (where the Consolto widget is installed) or to your Consolto ClickNTalk page, can join the meeting.

How on-demand group meetings happen? simply let your customers start a video/audio call with you from your widget or ClickNTalk page and accept them one by one. You will see a notification pop up during the call as customers request to join the meeting.

More info and FAQ in the group meeting help doc

Our next big milestone is an improved appointment scheduling backoffice. Soon-to-be-launched, it will finally let you replace your Zoom+Calendly duo with one cohesive solution.

‍