New research from RingCentral has found that more than 90% of business leaders use phones as one of their main tools of communication. 

The research uncovered several interesting findings including that phone is being used across all parts of businesses, the size of the business doesn’t impact its popularity, the usage of phones is expected to increase, traditional phone systems are the most used, and more. 

The researchers collected data from an online survey of 355 participants, with 150 from the United States, 101 from Canada, and 104 from the United Kingdom. 

Steven Zachok, Vice President, Product Management at RingCentral, said: “Telephony has been a constant in the workplace for decades. While digital channels like messaging and video have grown in popularity, the study shows voice is here to stay and is, in fact, the preferred mode of communication. 

“Critical for customer engagement, as evidenced by the 85% of survey respondents who said the phone was an important tool.

“It’s clear that business leaders continue to invest in phone communication because it’s easy for employees to use, and it’s the channel consumers prefer.”   

Not only do more than 90% consider phones one of their main communication tools, 52% said it is their primary communication tool. Furthermore, 95% said phones are crucial to customer engagement and generating income. 

The size of the company has no bearing on the likelihood of it being a primary communication tool. 58% of small companies and 55% of large enterprises both regarded phones in this way. 

Phone is used in all contexts within businesses, the research found. They are used for external client calls (82%), external client meetings (61%), external vendor calls (70%), inbound customer service (52%), outbound customer calls (64%), internal calls (74%), and internal meetings (59%).    

Traditional phones system still appears to be the most popular as most respondents said they primarily use mobile or on-prem phones, although there are a growing number of cloud solutions (31%). 

Phones are expected to be used increasingly, according to respondents. Only 5% were expecting the usage of phones to go down at their company. 

Business leaders also said that they want the ability to use their phone for calls and 34% ranked phone calls as one of their top three uses, with text messaging coming in just below at 30%. 

Phone is not the only traditional communication channel to show promise for the future. More than 95% of respondents reported using SMS in some form at their company, particularly at larger organisations. 

Jon Arnold, Principal, J Arnold & Associates, an independent industry analyst firm, said: “Businesses know that telephony is more than just a communications application, and is central for workplace productivity. 

“When investing in technologies to support hybrid work, compromises cannot be made with telephony given its real-time nature, as well as the fact that the research shows how telephony usage is only going to increase.” 

Recently, RingCentral added AI video features to both RingCentral Video and RingCentral MVP. Amir Hameed, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Solution Sales and Engineering at Ringcentral spoke to UC Today about the benefits of AI at UC Expo 2022. 

 

 



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