It used to be that all the tools a good administrative assistant needed were a stack of scratch pads, a drawer full of pens, a telephone, and a computer. Nowadays, things are a little different. Technology has both created new business opportunities and new ways to deal with those opportunities.
In today’s world of fast-paced virtual business, it’s more important than ever for a good administrative assistant to remain on top of the cutting-edge tools they can use to make their job easier and more productive. These tools can range from dictation software and note-taking apps to custom calendaring applications and anything in between.
But there is one tool that typically gets very little attention from admin assistants looking to up their game. What is that app, you ask? Why, a good teleprompter application, of course.
Some of the greatest potential obstacles lurking in waiting for any administrative assistant revolve around communication. This is especially true if you work in a virtual workspace and have to meet with clients and coworkers through the use of virtual meeting apps such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
It can be a struggle to provide quality customer service in a virtual space. The customers expect you to not only look and conduct yourself professionally, but to do it in a small video window on their computer that they stare at relentlessly. It can be difficult to remain engaged in that circumstance.
It can also be a struggle, especially if your business deals with multiple accounts, to remember all the salient details about the customer with whom you are speaking and can cause you to stumble in recalling facts or strategies, which in turn can hurt both your credibility and that of your company.
“Now wait,” you say, “where in the world does a teleprompter come into all this? Aren’t those just for TV studios or YouTube personalities?”
It’s true, teleprompters are mostly associated with TV personalities or any kind of business where a person has to recite a script while looking into a camera. But that also includes the modern administrative assistant in today’s virtual marketplace, doesn’t it?
A teleprompter app like VODIUM works by overlaying a prepared script over a portion of the video window of the virtual meeting app you use. VODIUM positions itself as close to the webcam as possible so that it appears you are making eye contact with your viewers, but other apps may do it differently.
A good teleprompter app will have a variety of features such as auto-scrolling, allowing you to set the speed of the scroll and even set pauses at specific points. It will also be compatible with all the major virtual meeting applications such as Zoom, Skype, or Microsoft Teams.
It should also have the ability to allow you to take notes on the fly and input them into the teleprompter as you go, allowing you to edit your speech or notes as needed in real-time.
What makes a teleprompter app so effective for an admin assistant is that you appear to be giving your audience your full and undivided attention even as you read a prepared speech, scroll through a list of notes, or even type in new notes. It makes you appear effective, and that translates into confidence for the client.
One of the hardest things to accomplish as an administrative assistant is keeping all the details of the various clients and inter-company personnel straight in your head. What are their personalities? What was their last order? Do they have a cordial or adversarial relationship with your company? Do you even remember their name?
There are note-taking solutions for this, but almost all of them require taking your eyes away from the camera to consult, which can lead to split concentration and mistakes at crucial moments.
Teleprompter apps like VODIUM, however, allow you to have the pertinent information you need right in front of your eyes without ever having to look away from the camera. Best of all, you can pre-load all the most important information into a single teleprompter file in order to have it all at your fingertips with barely any effort to bring it up.
Even better, most teleprompter apps will have some form of note-taking ability, so you can write down new information as it comes to light during a conversation or virtual meeting, allowing you to ensure you never forget another critical piece of information ever again!
Studies show that over 50% of all communication is non-verbal in nature. That means that over half of what we say is “heard” by our audience without our ever speaking a word. This fact is especially important to the admin assistant in a virtual meeting because it means that you have to make sure that what you communicate with your eye contact, hand motions, and other non-verbal cues sync up with what you’re saying.
A teleprompter app like VODIUM can take at least some of that pressure off, allowing you to read prepared statements rather than having to struggle with memorizing speeches ahead of time. This in turn frees up your concentration to focus on the messages you are sending non-verbally to your audience while still speaking intelligently thanks to the scrolling text of the teleprompter.
This is an area in which a teleprompter app truly shines. If you have a big presentation coming up that you can’t afford to flub, or even if it’s just an upcoming virtual call with a client or co-worker, you want to put your best foot forward.
In the olden days, this might mean memorizing a prepared speech to give at the beginning of the interaction or having a set of talking points to which you refer throughout the conversation.
A teleprompter app like VODIUM allows you to prepare all these interactions ahead of time, and load them into the teleprompter screen as necessary.
No more memorizing speeches, and no more sheaves of notes to refer to during a critical meeting. Now, you simply load them up into the teleprompter app before the meeting starts, and you can scroll through the information at your leisure without having to break eye contact. This will allow you to appear calm and confident in yourself and your material as you present it to your audience.
They say the key to good comedy is all about the timing. That advice applies just as much to the business presentation as well. Talk too fast, and your listeners will have difficulty engaging with you. Talk too slowly, and you risk boring your audience and losing them to the next exciting game on their phones. Hit it just right, though, and you’ll be able to keep them interested and active in the presentation.
A teleprompter app excels at keeping your pacing exactly where it needs to be. Most, like VODIUM, will have an auto-scrolling feature that will feed you the text of your prepared presentation at a rate set and adjusted by you. They will also have a manual scrolling option for those presentations that have a more organic nature rather than a regimented presentation.
VODIUM is a premiere teleprompter app in its field, designed to work with all the major video meeting services and sure to give you a leg-up when it comes to handling your administrative tasks. Best of all, the teleprompter app can be used by a team of administrators to ensure that they all present the same on-point message to clients and co-workers. Stop by our website and see how VODIUM can help smooth out the bumps in the road on your administrative journey. We also offer a free trial for you to try out VODIUM and see if it’s right for you!