Communication Channels Hindering UK Businesses, Reports Unified Communication Expo

The UK’s leading business communication event, Unified Communication Expo 2011, conducted a survey on unified communication channels across the business world—finding the increase of communication channels such as instant messaging and social media is making it increasing difficult for UK businesses to unify their communication channels and communicate with one voice.

Around 126 decision makers and professionals who were registered to attend the Unified Communications (News - Alert) EXPO in Olympia were among the key players who took part in the research and came from various backgrounds in management, IT strategy, implementation, infrastructures, development and design.

The research found that 50 percent of the people who took the survey already had a unified communication and collaboration solution in place. However, 80 percent of them were not satisfied with the solution and believed that more could be achieved.

Integrated communication was quite common among the consumer world, with employees becoming more productive with the use of smartphones with easy integration to voice, video and text that form an essential part of business communication. Looking at the consumer world scenario, around 80 percent of the respondents believed that the business world was also in need of a similar kind of unified communication solution.

Another factor that was effecting the slow adoption of unified communications in both business and technology sectors was the lack of finances. There also seemed a marked difference between the needs of the business world compared to that of the IT world relative to the adoption of unified communication based solution with ROI being the main focus for the business sector and the cost factor being the key factor for IT department.

In a release, Mike England, director of Unified Communications Expo, said, “Right now, companies are focusing on return to growth, so there is increasing demand across the board to drive business outcomes, and unified communications could help with this. However, the research suggests that UK businesses are still struggling to get to grips with the approach, and that the wealth of communication channels, especially social media related channels, is hindering rather than helping them.”

England added that next month’s seminar will bring together decision makers and IT professionals to understand and explore these particular channels under the “Social Business & Collaboration” seminar stream.