Voicemail and email are out; chat apps reign supreme
The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital communication tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams.
If you have kids, you already know it: they don’t use email. It’s about as high-tech as that rotary phone in the back of your closet. But communications is not only changing at the street level; it’s changing at the business level too.
Spiceworks Ziff Davis surveyed 1,000 IT workers in North America and Europe and discovered that 51% of them prefer real-time business chat apps over email. Analog voice mail usage is also dropping from 52% adoption rate in 2019 to 43% over the last three-year period.
Related: Zoom, Slack, Box? Which apps are dominating the digital workplace?
“Since we started tracking the adoption of and sentiment around business chat apps in 2016, it’s become very clear that communication tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams have provided immense value to workers, especially in a remote environment,” said Peter Tsai, Head of Technology Insights, SWZD. “Now with a large majority of workers using these tools frequently and ‘digitally-native’ workers increasingly entering the workforce, we can expect employee preferences to continue to shift away from email to these more interactive platforms.”
The report, Workplace Communications in 2022 and Beyond, also showed that despite the shift, the rapid adoption of web conferencing that took place at the start of the pandemic has leveled off to some degree. In terms of keeping those systems secure, 63% of companies in 2022 believe their communications tools offer adequate encryption to secure internal and external communications, up from 49% in 2019.
Moving forward, the report says that legacy solutions “will have to transform, or they will be displaced as more workers increase their usage of chat apps over email, and communication technologies continue to evolve…businesses will increasingly look to consolidate communication functionality into fewer tools.”
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