This finding was revealed in a recent CIO survey from Orange Business Services, the key brand of telecommunications operator France Telecom.
Orange Business Services surveyed more than 600 CIOs from multinational corporations operating in a wide range of industries. These respondents have a favourable opinion about unified communications, and believe it can have a positive impact on business efficiency.
According to the report, on average, organisations support at least seven different communication tools and applications used by employees. Too many communication tools not only challenge internal collaboration but it also slows down business processes and decision-making.
When asked about the challenges faced due to multiple communications, the majority (95 per cent) of the respondents said they have improved the business productivity but are not satisfied by the resulting slow speed of communication. Around 45 per cent of CIOs agree that colleague response time decreases significantly due to multiple communication channels and 35 per cent said this uncoordinated colleague contact can ultimately lead to decreased profitability and unhappy customers.
The lack of coordinated communication has driven many companies (41 per cent) to consider adopting unified communication solutions and around 15 per cent are already trying out or evaluating these systems. Around six per cent of the companies surveyed are using a unified communication solution and reported improvement in both sales and customer services.
Unified communications simplifies and integrates all forms of communications. The survey respondents said all these activities–integrating mobile devices into the enterprise, implementing real-time identification through presence, unified messaging, instant messaging, audio conferencing and desktop videoconferencing–can contribute to organisations' bottom line.
“Orange Business Services is committed to helping its customers achieve efficient and fluid communication within their organisation and with their own customers,” said Helmut Reisinger, senior vice president, Orange Business Services. “At Orange, we create customised solutions that integrate all the collaborative tools needed into a single user-friendly interface which are accessible from office PCs, laptops, mobile phones or PDAs, so our customers can get the information they need, whenever they need it. This leads to improvement of business processes and organisational responsiveness.”
