Clinton Cards wants to expand staff access to audio conferencing after finding it has improved internal communications.

This solution was launched a year ago, provided by MeetingZone, a conferencing and collaboration service provider, to improve the communication between the Clinton Cards head office in Loughton, Essex, and its field based operations team. This is especially important during peak trading periods.

Clinton Cards operations manager Wendy Allison said that audio conferencing proved invaluable over the Christmas trading period: “To make sure that critical sales messages were communicated quickly and easily, we opened up access to MeetingZone’s services to include our area managers so they could communicate with their store managers as necessary.”

Regional managers already have unlimited access to this system, and Clinton Cards is now looking at providing unlimited access for 38 area managers.

The system allows staff to concentrate on their day-to-day job and improves accuracy of communication. Before deploying a conferencing solution, Clinton Card’s regional managers phoned or e-mailed their area managers on an individual basis and information was also distributed through the post. Allison explained: “Conferencing has allowed us to considerably raise the level of verbal collaboration between the whole team as a group which means information delivered is less likely to be incorrectly interpreted.”

She added: “The conferencing solution allows us to deliver timely and consistent messaging throughout all of our stores and has reduced workloads by enabling the same message to be delivered to a group.”