Business Communication Trends to Focus on in 2018

As there are more and more advances in technology, which rapidly keeps transforming the way we work, businesses need to embrace the changes and keep up with the latest trends if they want to stay competitive and relevant. Constant innovations in technology are making a huge impact on various organizations, and their communications are what seems to be undergoing greatest changes.

Every single business owner certainly looks to improve communication within their organization on an ongoing basis in order to streamline their daily operations and keep everything running smoothly. If you want to accomplish that and maintain a competitive edge in 2018, now is the time to take your business communications to the next level, so take a look at the latest trends that are reshaping that landscape.

Chatbots are becoming more and more popular and their use is only expected to grow. Why? Because people are spending more and more time on social media, and business owners are taking that opportunity to connect with customers and prospects and be available for them 24/7.

With the use of a chatbot, businesses can stay in touch with their consumers anytime and anywhere, efficiently answering their queries and closing deals. Not only can they increase engagement and customer satisfaction with a chatbot, but they can also save a significant amount of time and money on customer interactions.

The best thing about chatbots is that you can easily build and deploy your own bot, without any coding whatsoever. The best chatbot platform that you should check out is SnatchBot, as not only does it make building a chatbot a real piece of cake, but it also has a state-of-the-art NLP, enterprise-grade security, and it is completely free of charge, with no hidden costs.

Moreover, SnatchBot is the only omni-channel bot-building platform, and it even has a Bot Store with a number of pre-built bots that you can use. If you want to take your customer interactions to the next level, be sure to check it out and explore the SnatchBot’s vision of the future of business communications.

The ever-increasing mobile use is considerably changing the workforce, as both business owners and their employees are using their mobile devices to access the necessary documents and data in order to work more efficiently and effectively.

If you want to improve the communication, collaboration, and productivity of your workforce, you should make sure that your employees can easily perform their tasks from any device, thereby completing them faster and improving their overall performance, eventually helping you reduce costs and increase ROI.

Cloud computing is quickly becoming the norm for collaboration in the business world, as it enables teams to communicate, and access and edit files in real-time, regardless of their geographic location. If you have at least one remote employee, moving to the cloud is absolutely a must, because you will enable everyone to work together, no matter where they are.

Not only does cloud computing make all your files instantly accessible wherever you are, but it also significantly reduces implementation and maintenance costs and greatly improves collaboration. Moreover, you can scale your infrastructure up or down, depending on your changing needs.

Although everyone seems to be moving to the cloud, video conferencing endpoints are still widely used. Almost every single organization in the world has video conferencing endpoints in their conference rooms in order to make sure that they can connect with employees, clients and customers via high-quality video.

However, the growing trend is extending those videoconferencing boundaries by connecting the endpoints to cloud video conferencing services. Given the fact that the endpoints are being moved to the cloud, the costs can be reduced and ROI increased, not to mention that your entire workforce can communicate with anyone they want, anytime they want, and using any device they want.

Numerous tools that businesses use to communicate and collaborate with their teams are increasingly converging, making it much easier to stay connected and work more efficiently and effectively.

Until relatively recently, you needed to use several different tools to communicate with employees and other co-workers. Now, all you need is one or a few collaboration platforms to communicate with them in real-time, whether that includes live chat, videoconferencing, or web conferencing.

Videos are quite rapidly taking over the Internet. According to a report by Cisco, videos will make up 82% of all consumer Internet traffic by 2021, 13% of which will account for live video. Brands are increasingly realizing the major potential of videos and how great of an impact video marketing campaigns can have on their organizations, which is why they are implementing video content everywhere.

The rise of videos has brought a new trend – live video streaming. This trend hugely reflected on businesses, which started live streaming their webinars, their important meetings, and even their training. By doing so, they can connect with a greater number of people and extend their reach globally.

You need a web browser for pretty much everything you do on the Internet. When it comes to business, you use a browser for various communication and collaboration tools, such as project management software, for instance. However, not every browser supports all tools that you may be using or want to use, so you need to make sure in advance that your business communications will never get disrupted.

This is where WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) comes in to save the day. It includes APIs and protocols for communication that enable you to seamlessly exchange data between browsers without any intermediaries, which greatly improves business communication and collaboration. A Credence Research report shows that WebRTC market is expected to grow at a CAGR (compound annual growth rate) of more than 40% by 2023.

As 2017 is coming to an end, make sure you take these business communication trends into consideration and evaluate what changes you should implement in 2018 in order to improve your business and gain a considerable competitive edge. It is highly recommended that you follow all of these trends, since that way you will definitely take your entire organization to a whole new level of success.