Do Businesses Really Need New Communications Tools To Improve Customer Communication?

12/11/2009

By Daniel Fuller-Smith, Sales Manager UK and EMEA, Toshiba BCD

Over the last ten years, businesses have talked about embracing new communication methods such as Instant Messenger and video conferencing, in an attempt to find the quickest and most reliable method of contacting customers.

Yet for day-to-day communications, only a small amount of office workers are actually using them; recent research found 79 per cent of small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) still feel the desk phone is the most important communication method. So why is this?

New communication tools

Many of the new communication tools can significantly help in meeting...

...communication challenges, improving reliability, speed, security and quality of communication. Yet research found only 13 per cent of SMEs use instant messenger (IM), only 10 per cent use web conferencing, and just under 10 per cent use video conferencing. So despite the potential benefits they offer, they are not meeting the challenges SMEs face.

Online tools such as video conferencing and IM can be beneficial in speeding up communication. For example, web and video conferencing removes the need to travel, which is beneficial to organisations with customers far away or abroad, when you would normally need to drive or fly. This could also be true of companies spread across many branch offices, where travel costs need to be kept to a minimum. For these reasons web and video conferencing are the communication methods expected to gain the most in importance in the next two years (22.0 per cent and 21.7 per cent respectively). However, at the moment 90 per cent of SMEs don't see these tools as important, perhaps because they benefit larger organisations more.

For the same reasons, 68 per cent of office workers in SMEs have never used IM at work. The primary benefit is for internal communication, so... continued on page two >

 

 

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