Ring Central says the phone is here to stay, and they’ve got the data to prove it.

Our partners at RingCentral recently shared the results of a survey of business leaders and their plans for communication this coming year. Here are some significant results:

1. Phones are still a primary communication tool.

Over 90% of the respondents said that phones were considered a primary communication tool. Even those businesses that don’t think the telephone is their direct communication channel say it is still one of their primary tools.
These findings back up data from a recent NTT global customer experience benchmarking report, which found that while businesses may prefer different contact channels for various business processes, they consider a phone and in-person as the preferred and most effective contact channels.

71.4% of businesses prefer phone or in-person when handling retention/escalation/dispute resolution issues
63.6% prefer phone or in-person for sales proactive (outbound) and 54.8% for sales reactive (inbound)
43.6% prefer to handle general customer service issues via phone or in-person

2. The size of the company doesn’t impact phone usage

Regardless of the size, making phone calls is still a popular way to stay in touch. For example, according to their study, 58% of small companies or businesses with less than 99 employees said their primary mode of staying in touch was through the phone. That’s compared to the next highest group, which said phones were 55.7% of their primary communication method. Overall, across all sizes, 52.1% reported that the phone was their most common form of communication.

3. Professionals prefer phone calls and in-person meetings over emails because they are more effective.

The research shows that employees primarily prefer using the phone for internal and external communication. According to their survey, managers, and leadership also prefer communicating via phone when speaking individually to employees.

Here’s the complete 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%

4. There continues to be a gap in adoption between traditional and cloud phone systems

Traditional solutions are still the most common for business communication, with 64.8% of their employees using a work cell phone and 50.1% using a personal phone for business communication. More than half (53.2%) report on-premise phones, while 30.7% use cloud-based phone systems, which is expected to increase as employees become more remote or work from home in hybrid jobs.

5. Business phone usage is not expected to decline

The research shows that most companies expect phone use to increase over the next few years. In fact, only 5% expect phone use to decrease.

This means organizations should have a clear plan for how to maximize phone communication in the years to come. If you’re looking for assistance with your plan, please fill out the form below, and we’ll contact you!