The majority of businesses still prefer the phone over other communication tools, and businesses that don’t consider the phone to be their primary communicable channel still count it among one of their main tools, according to new research from RingCentral.
The communication and collaboration provider says it conducted a survey of business owners and how they plan to communicate with customers and employees in the coming year and found that more than 90% say phones are still considered a key communication tool.
Even at businesses that don’t consider the phone to be their primary communication channel, 40% still say it’s one of their main tools.
According to RingCentral, 58% of small companies with fewer than 100 employees were most likely to say phone is their primary communication tool, and 56% of large businesses with between 1,000 and 9,999 employees said the same. Between businesses and enterprises of all sizes, 52.1% said phone is their primary communication method.
RingCentral also found that phone calls are more popular for both internal and external business communication.
According to their responses, business leaders prefer phone conversations when speaking with individuals instead of groups. Here’s the breakdown:
- Internal calls: 73.8%
- Internal meetings: 58.6%
- External client calls: 82%
- External client meetings: 60.8%
- External vendor calls: 69.6%
- External vendor meetings: 49%
- Outbound customer calls: 63.4%
- Inbound customer service: 52.1%
Even when speaking to groups of team members or customers in meetings, more than half prefer to use phones.
Although cloud telephony is becoming more popular, RingCentral found that traditional business phone systems are still more popular. According to the survey, 64.8% of employees use a business number on a mobile phone and 50.1% use a personal number of their mobile phone for business. Further, 53.2% use legacy on-premises pones for business communication.
Meanwhile, 30.7% of companies surveyed use cloud-based phone systems, a trend expected to increase with the rise of remote and hybrid work.
About 63% of businesses told RingCentral that they expect phone use to increase over the next few years, but they want flexible, multi-device phone solutions to do so. For example, cited the ability to make and receive calls and send business SMS message from a personal computer as their most requested features. Others include cloud recordings of calls, high-volume SMS for marketing and customer care, migrating existing phone numbers to a new provider, logging calls in CRM platforms, visual voicemail and more.
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