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Looking toward the future of business communications: The latest trends

Looking toward the future of business communications: The latest trends

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What does the future of business communications hold? Since the invention of the telephone, business communications have been evolving rapidly. Technology has drastically improved how we communicate. From the rise of robust mobile devices to the domination of virtual meetings, where will business communications go next? 

A recent poll stated that 48% of employees will work remotely at least part-time moving forward. This means that messaging, video, and phone services will play an even more critical role for companies in helping both remote and in-office workers stay connected. 

In this post, we’ll cover the top trends for the future of business communications and how RingCentral fits into this picture to help you and other small and mid-sized companies stay ahead of the curve. Keeping up with the latest trends and tech can help you boost employee productivity, customer happiness, and your ROI. 


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Top business communications trends shaping the future 

From adopting secure and reliable unified communications to valuable software integrations, the top future trends focus on making your workflow more efficient while increasing your bottom line. 

Harnessing the power of unified communications

Unified communications is here to stay. In fact, in 2020, the unified communications and collaboration market grew over 29% compared to 2019, reaching $47.2 billion.

Size of the global unified communications & collaboration market from 2018 to 2023 (in billion U.S. dollars)

Statista size of the global unified communication and collaboration market from 2018-2023

With advanced unified communications tools, like RingCentral MVP™, you can create a cohesive space for all your workplace communications, including messaging, video, and phone. More companies are now moving to a single vendor for all their business and communications needs. This not only streamlines your workflows but also lessens the pain and complications that stem from juggling multiple vendors—multiple vendors only leads to headaches and higher costs.

Providing a more effortless user experience will remain a priority in the future, which is why unified communications is key. Having all business communications essentials (messaging, video meetings, phone calls, texts, and faxes) conveniently located in a single app makes it easy for your team to stay connected whenever and wherever they are. 

With RingCentral MVP, you can handle all your business communications wherever you go. You can easily communicate on any device and switch seamlessly between your phone, tablet, or laptop without fumbling with logins or missing a beat. 

When Morning Light, an award-winning nonprofit hospice residence, needed a cost-effective solution that allowed them complete mobility, RingCentral MVP made sure they were never out of reach. Tom Fodor, Morning Light’s Executive Director, said:

“RingCentral helps us by being reliable and cost-effective. They do everything—supply the infrastructure, take messages, direct calls—and we’re never out of touch with the people who need us.

Tom Fodor, Executive Director at Morning Light

Prioritizing reliability and security

Gone are the days when a closed door meant a conversation was private. Whether you’re communicating internally or sending sensitive customer and company data to external parties, you need to equip yourself with reliable and secure software.

Businesses must arm themselves with a business communications system that provides best-in-class reliability and comprehensive security. This should include world-class regulatory compliance and the best cybersecurity technologies.

RingCentral keeps your workplace secure, instituting seven layers of robust security within our architecture and processes, to protect your data and communications against fraud and abuse. Our leading security certifications include SOC 3 and HITRUST, and compliance with industry requirements, such as HIPAA and FINRA. These ensure that users always operate securely and in accordance with industry standards.

RingCentral's seven layers of security

Our global certifications include: 

  • SOC 2
  • SOC 3
  • HITRUST
  • FINRA
  • HIPAA
  • C5
  • ISO 27017
  • ISO 27018 
  • GDPR

Driving ROI and productivity

As a medium or small business, you may find that you don’t have nearly enough hours in a day to get everything done, and with a standard on-premises PBX system, you may experience high phone bills and separate costs for messaging services. Your communications stack should drive value across your business, accelerating your productivity and boosting your ROI—the key drivers to business success. 

You can improve productivity, increase your ROI, and reduce your TCO effortlessly when you bundle your message, video, and phone solutions into a single system with RingCentral: one app, one bill, one vendor, one solution. With RingCentral, you can also access an advanced integrated analytics portal to help you track performance. 

Curious to learn how RingCentral can help drive ROI and productivity for your business? RingCentral’s small and medium business customers reported measurable improvements in their ROI and productivity, with an average ROI of 52% and increase in employee productivity of 33%. They also experience an increase in customer satisfaction of 50%, with a 50% decrease in in-person meetings. As you’re evaluating a new communications tool, ensure it can deliver measurable results like RingCentral.


👀  Learn more customer success metrics proving RingCentral’s value for small and medium businesses.

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Junk Chunkers, improved their productivity and ROI by switching to RingCentral MVP. They were even able to supercharge their productivity by taking advantage of CRM and project management platform integrations to simplify workflows. 

With their employees able to communicate from anywhere, they were also able to eliminate time wasted commuting to work in the adverse weather conditions common to their location and the expense of expanding their physical office space. As a result, they increased their revenue by 230%. Al Noufaro, the founder and CEO, stated:

Since we rolled out RingCentral, our revenue has more than doubled—it’s up 230%. We’ve reviewed all other factors to see what else might be responsible, and we’ve isolated RingCentral as the primary driver.”

Al Noufaro, Founder and CEO at Junk Chuckers

Building a more connected workspace with integrations

It’s clear that integrations play a critical role when it comes to building a more connected workspace. With integrations, you don’t need to waste time toggling between multiple apps anymore. Let’s look at some key stats that prove the value of integrations and how it improves your flow of work.

  • 69% of workers waste up to 60 minutes a day navigating between apps. That’s up to 32 days per year.
  • 56% find searching for information in different apps is disruptive. 
  • 57% believe up to $500K is lost because of poor integrations and lack of resources. 

RingCentral has always recognized the importance of powerful integrations. With RingCentral, you can leverage 250+ integrations in the RingCentral App Gallery and open APIs through the RingCentral developer portal to customize all your workflows. You can use your existing applications, like Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, and Google Cloud, while ensuring that all of these different applications coexist seamlessly.

integrations

One popular integration users love is RingCentral for Salesforce. With this integration, users can enhance their CRM and service management experience by automating workflows, increasing call efficiency, and improving the quality of customer interactions. Seattle-based comparison company Porch greatly benefitted from adding RingCentral telephony to its Salesforce platform. 

The company uses Salesforce to track and manage its customer interactions. RingCentral saved the company time and financial savings. 

It made sense to go with RingCentral because the administrative capabilities are there and no development is required.

Ankur Pradhan, Senior Salesforce Developer at Porch

RingCentral Cloud PBX for Microsoft Teams

Businesses want flexibility and options to deploy their unified communications suite the way that best meets their unique business needs. Whether your business wants to take a multi-vendor or single-vendor approach, RingCentral provides you the flexibility and options your business needs to be successful—no matter which tools you choose.

If your business is already set up with Microsoft Teams, upgrade to enterprise-grade telephony with RingCentral Cloud PBX for Microsoft Teams. Since the RingCentral Cloud PBX for Microsoft Teams integrates natively into Teams, users can enjoy the same Teams interface they’ve been using with no additional downloads, bots, or plugins. Users get the best of both Teams and RingCentral in one app, improving the flow of work and making adoption simple since no retraining is required.

RingCentral Cloud PBX for Microsoft Teams

Your business can reap in numerous benefits with RingCentral Cloud PBX for Microsoft Teams, including the following:

  • Advanced PBX features: Use call controls, IVR and call handling, automatic call recording, reports and analytics, call queues, SMS, and fax to name a few.
  • 99.999% uptime SLA: Get an extra layer of reliability with 99.999% uptime SLA, which translates to only six minutes of downtime per year. For comparison, Microsoft Teams’ 99.9% uptime SLA, which translates to nine hours of downtime every year.
  • Flexibility: Quickly add new users in just a few seconds. 
  • Ready to deploy: RingCentral can help maintain and operate your complete high-availability Teams Direct Routing infrastructure using Microsoft-certified session border controllers (SBC).
  • Third-party integrations: Customize your workflows with 250+ out-of-the-box integrations in the RingCentral App Gallery and open APIs through the RingCentral developer portal. Enable your users to work directly from apps they already use, whether it’s Salesforce, Google Cloud, Zendesk, or another popular app.

🔍  Discover the top 12 benefits of RingCentral Cloud PBX for Microsoft Teams with our free datasheet.

👀 Get the RingCentral Cloud PBX for Microsoft Teams datasheet.

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Howard Kennedy is a top UK law firm (with 400 employees) that uses RingCentral Cloud PBX for Microsoft Teams to consolidate business communications and serve their global network of clients around the world. 

RingCentral gave Howard Kennedy everything they needed in one place and helped elevate their Microsoft Teams setup with top-tier telephony. Jonathan Freedman, the Chief Information Security and Technology Officer, commented that, “RingCentral took us from having to support seven communications platforms—none integrated with the others—to one unified communications platform for everything.”

RingCentral Cloud PBX for Teams integrated effortlessly into our Microsoft Teams environment. On top of this, RingCentral had 99.999% availability and a solid reputation for business telephony.”

Jonathan Freedman, Chief Information Security and Technology Officer at Howard Kennedy

Get ahead with RingCentral

There’s no doubt that the way we work has rapidly evolved in the last year—so has the communications tools and software we rely on. RingCentral lets you run your business from anywhere. Whether you’re in the office, at home, or on the move, you can work productively and seamlessly across messaging, video meetings, and phone calls from a single app. 

There’s a reason RingCentral has been named a Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant Leader six years in a row. RingCentral is a power player that’s here to stay because we’re a company that recognizes the value of keeping on top of the latest trends and technology. As a brand now trusted by more than 350,000 small businesses, you can’t go wrong. 

We scale with your business, and with the RingCentral Advantage (a comprehensive mix of experts, tools, and resources to help you successfully deploy RingCentral across your business), we’ll be there for you every step of the way. RingCentral’s award-winning platform enables your business to grow, while empowering you to co-create innovations for your business for the next decade.

 

Originally published Aug 17, 2021, updated Jun 23, 2024

Work together from anywhere with messaging, video conferencing, and phone calls—all in a single platform.

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