1. 2020 Business Communications Trends in the Age of COVID-19

Business Chat Use Grows During the Remote Revolution

In recent years, a new class of real-time messaging tools has been making waves, and the rush to remote work during the COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the already rapid rise of these business chat apps, such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Slack, a pioneer in the space, built out a niche with its real-time messaging app starting in 2013, gradually edging its way into the mainstream. Seeing the success of this upstart, Microsoft got into the game with Teams in 2016, eventually taking the top spot from Slack in 2018 when we found that 21% of businesses used Teams. And in April of 2020, Microsoft announced that Teams had 75+ million Daily Active Users (DAUs).

In an age where personal instant messaging is pervasive, many workers have found that using real-time, team-based chat platforms makes more sense than email for certain conversations, as these applications lend themselves to more natural real-time conversations with a familiar, friendly user interface. Threaded group chats, the ability to embed rich media, integrations with popular apps, and the ability to easily scroll through chat history are all compelling advantages Slack and Teams hold over email. 

Additionally, many chat platforms integrate voice and video functionality for more seamless conversations when verbal communication makes more sense sending text. And in the absence of face-to-face meetings, channels within these chat apps can facilitate group conversations, which help teams feel more connected.

According to our survey, in June 2020, 81% of businesses were using business chat apps, a big jump from 67% in 2019. Additionally, three months into the COVID-19 crisis, more than one-third (37%) of IT decision-makers reported employees in their organization preferring to use business chat apps over email for internal communications — up from 31% in 2019.  

The growth trajectory for business chat apps was already positive, but COVID-19 drastically accelerated that trend. Previous estimates from our 2019 study were for 77% adoption of apps like Slack and Teams by the end of 2021, and we already blew past that figure in mid-2020.

Pandemic Drives Web Conferencing Use

With in-person meetings out of the question and half of the companies expecting to have flexible work-from-home policies in place even after the COVID-19 crisis subsides, web conferencing apps experienced a surge in popularity. However, our data indicates this growth might have come at the expense of older voice technologies.

Over the last year, while the use of analog voice technology decreased by seven percentage points, adoption of web conferencing apps was up by an additional 10%, growing from 69% of businesses in 2019 to 79% in 2020. Frequency of use was up among adopters of web conferencing tools as well —we’ll share in-depth information on that trend later in the report.

Additionally, some vendors in the web conferencing space reported huge usage growth during the pandemic. Famously, Zoom added 190M daily active users in the span of 3 months, and Google said daily usage of their Meet web conferencing platform grew “more than 25 times” in two months.

Workplace Communications Usage Trends: The Good and Bad

First, some good news. 75% of respondents reported communications tools meeting their organizations’ needs in 2020, up significantly from 67% in 2019. However, as any IT support professional can tell you, these apps can come with a learning curve, which can be challenging for less tech-savvy users. Our data indicates amid the COVID-19 pandemic, 30% of organizations say end users regularly experience technical difficulties with web conferencing solutions — which could also be a result of inadequate bandwidth when relying on residential internet connections.

Additionally, overlapping voice, video, and chat functionality between various communications platforms could lead to additional end-user confusion. 27% of survey respondents said employees in their organization were overwhelmed by the number of communications solutions available to them.

But there are additional bright spots in our survey. Increased adoption of IT-provided messaging tools appears to have reduced at least some “shadow IT” — end users utilizing apps or services outside of the IT department’s control — which could result in data leaks. While 43% of businesses said employees frequently used personal mobile devices for internal communications in 2019, that figure dropped significantly to 38% in 2020.

Note: A smaller percentage of organizations reported preferring to consolidate communications into one all-encompassing suite in 2020 (35%) than in 2019 (41%), perhaps because many acceptable options are available on the market today — some of which come bundled with collaboration software organizations are already paying for. Also, it’s possible that with app integrations becoming more common, business needs are increasingly being met, because their communications and collaboration solutions work better together within the same framework, even if they’re provided by multiple vendors.

2. The State of Workplace Communications in 2020

Looking at the bigger picture, a wide range of business communications solutions are in use today. Across all company sizes, the majority of organizations use email (97%), business chat apps (81%), VoIP (79%), and web conferencing apps (79%), and text messaging (69%). 

For most communications technologies covered in our survey, we expect to see two-year business adoption growth … with two exceptions. Corporate usage of already-ubiquitous email will stay flat, and analog voice adoption will very likely continue to fall — we already mentioned adoption dropping from 52% in 2019 to 45% in 2020 — as many organizations replace this legacy technology with VoIP, as digital phone systems make more sense for businesses implementing work-from-home policies.

While adoption is relatively low now, we expect the most growth over the next two years in secure communications platforms (11%), which use end-to-end encryption to protect sensitive data, and unified communications (10%) solutions, which combine multiple communications functions in a single platform. In light of this data, we expect focusing on security to continue to be a good way for vendors to differentiate their communications offerings from the pack.

Communications Trends by Company Size

Because they have more employees often spread across different geographies, larger companies tend to rely on more communications solutions than smaller businesses. And these bigger organizations are even more dependent on communications tools now that more employees are working remotely. According to our data, SMBs (1-999 employees) used an average of 5 different types of communications technologies in 2020, with that figure jumping to an average of 6 among enterprises (1000+ employees).

Additionally, 88% of enterprises used web conferencing apps in 2020 compared to 80% of mid-size businesses and 76% of small businesses. Additionally, 86% of enterprises used business chat apps months into the pandemic, compared to 83% of mid-size companies and 77% of small businesses.

3. Frequency of Internal vs. External Use of Communications Solutions

Our data shows that among current business adopters, email and VoIP are the most frequently used communications solutions, followed by business chat apps such as Slack and Teams. However, while email and VoIP are used for internal and external communications equally, there’s a significant difference among other popular mediums.

For example, real-time business chat apps — typically designed to facilitate intra-team collaboration — are frequently used for internal communications by 79% of adopters, compared to only 41% frequently using them for external communications. 

There’s a significant difference in internal and external business usage of SMS text messaging as well: 60% of adopters frequently use texting for internal communications, compared to 46% frequently using texting for external communications.

On the surface, use of web conferencing solutions appears to be closely split between internal and external usage. However, because larger organizations are often spread out geographically, enterprises tend to use them for internal communications more often than SMBs. For example, 68% of enterprises that have deployed web conferencing solutions frequently use them for internal communications, compared to 60% of mid-size and 48% of small business adopters.

Year-Over-Year Changes in Usage Frequency

We’ve already discussed how web conferencing and business chat apps both experienced significant year-over-year adoption gains. In addition to that overall growth, our data also shows increases in frequency of use as well, for both internal and external use. 

For example, adopters reporting frequent use of web conferencing tools increased 7 percentage points for internal communications and 8 percentage points for external communications between 2019 and 2020. Business chat app adopters reporting frequent use of these tools went up 10 percentage points for internal communications and 11 percentage points for external communications between 2019 and 2020.

Also, while there wasn’t much growth in corporate usage of text messaging for internal communications, we noticed business users reporting frequent use of SMS for external communications increasing by 7 percentage points between 2019 and 2020.

4. Purchase Considerations for Communications Tools

To gain insights into how businesses make the decisions to purchase communications solutions, we asked IT buyers how much importance they place on various consideration factors. According to our research, 76% of IT decision-makers believe it’s critical for a communications tool to provide consistent reliability, making this the most important consideration.

User friendliness and great value for money round out the three most important purchase consideration factors. Other important attributes IT buyers pay attention to include advanced security features, ease of integration, manageability, and customer support.

Even during a pandemic, the rankings for consideration factors were practically the same as they were in 2019. However, there was one noticeable change from last year, as many businesses rushed to set up remote working solutions to maintain business continuity during the age of COVID-19.

While 39% of typically price sensitive SMBs (1-999 employees) indicated it was critical for communications tools to offer great value for money in 2019, that number dropped to 34% of SMBs in 2020. To explain this shift, one IT professional explained that at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis, resistance to IT spending faded as business decision-makers decided “they’ll put cash on the table for everything now, as they came to the conclusion ‘we need it now.’”

5. Growth Opportunities for Communications Providers

Looking towards the future, we expect the way companies communicate to continue to evolve. This is especially the case because half of companies plan to keep flexible work policies in place even after the pandemic ends, when it’s safe to return to physical offices.

As our data shows, more businesses taking part in the remote working revolution has and will continue to fuel increased adoption of VoIP, business chat apps, video conferencing tools, video conferencing platforms, and unified communications solutions. Additionally, there will be even greater growth in usage of secure messaging as encryption becomes more important when workers increasingly handle sensitive data outside of the relatively safe confines of firewalled corporate networks. 

As security concerns escalate with malicious actors increasingly targeting employees working from home — who often connect to outdated networks that also service personal devices — there are opportunities for vendors that can effectively help a remote workforce stay productive while helping to protect corporate devices and data. In this regard, vendors might raise security standards beyond end-to-end encryption. To attract security-minded customers, cloud-based communications providers can build comprehensive solutions with security built in from the ground up, taking an extensible approach to secure communications capable of meeting customers’ needs now and into the future.  

As business demands evolve and work styles shift towards a “work from anywhere” model where geographically dispersed teams will be more common, organizations will continue to depend on multiple communications applications and providers. We have a coronavirus to thank for the world’s largest work-from-home experiment ever, and the fact that 75% of businesses say communications tools meet their current needs proves that existing apps are doing a pretty good job at bringing workers together, even as they’re physically apart.

However, there’s always room for improvement. While group text and video chat technologies might have been sufficient for employees a few months into the pandemic, needs will likely evolve as remote work becomes the “new normal” over the long term. For example, with more people working outside of dedicated office space on a permanent basis — often around roommates or family members — there’s opportunity for products to stand out by doing a better job of dealing with environmental noise and other distractions.

And while multiple point communications solutions are working for organizations now, in the long run, business preferences could shift as IT buyers look to reduce complexity. Perhaps our data showing an additional 10% of organizations adopting unified communications solutions within 2 years suggests a shift from ‘silos to platforms’, which could help organizations keep data and communications workflows within a single unified stack.   

Finally, no company can rest on its laurels for long in the rapidly shifting technology industry. And given that reliability issues are the top concern among IT buyers, anyone who’s experienced technical difficulties on a video call —and that’s everyone by now — can tell you the current generation of communications products aren’t perfect. Going forward, factors like manageability and ease of use will also be of great concern to decision makers, especially if they’re responsible for resolving remote end users’ issues, an increasingly prevalent pain point among IT professionals.