In this digital age, more and more companies seek ways to implement effective business communication strategies. That is the reason team messaging and collaboration apps becoming important elements of a broader strategy. As per a report by No Jitter, 95% of IT professionals says team messaging and collaboration apps are a necessary element of their future communication strategy.

#1 Connect Anytime, Anywhere, on Any Device

The way of doing business operation has changed for employees, especially in the last few years with the emergence of “anytime, anywhere, on any device” business mandate of always-on global organisations. Current employees are more distributed, highly remote and expect to have collaboration and communication capabilities at their reach.

But now, the expectations are not just limited to sending off a text, send an email, or reach to a business colleague over the call from a business phone. Workers don’t just want to be available; they want a similar rich experience on their mobile devices such as tablets, laptops, smartphones as they can get on their desktops or in conference rooms. Leveraging the varieties of applications at their disposal for collaborating and communicating, many find attaining this particular experience a pipe dream.

Jumping one application from another for video conferencing, team messaging, and email exchanges are inconvenient and create challenges for both employees and businesses.

Reduction in employee’s productivity

According to a recent global survey by CITE research, switching from one communication application to another is not a small issue. Through this survey, it’s found out that communications volume is a challenge to getting basic work tasks done for 70% of respondents. From the same survey, the workers said they toggle between various applications 10 times in an hour, ultimately bringing down their productivity.

Reduction in Innovation

The incapability of employees to collaborate from a single application hinders effective teamwork by creating unnecessary barriers. Switching one application to others slows the conversation down to a crawl as well as room for innovation. For instance, two workers use email to discuss a project and share information via document. When they move to a phone conversation, each one has to search for the information from their respective device to support the discussion, which takes time. Therefore, lack of consistent context limits creative thinking and hinder productivity in the modern workspace.

Competitive threat

In today’s competitive economy structure, businesses survive and collapse based on their ability to be agile. The communication and collaboration platforms create a competitive differentiator. Organisations that are still restricting themselves from getting these platforms will endanger their ability to pull together the best resources and the possibility to be effective in markets.

#2 Collaborative Platforms

To stop these dangers, companies must organise the effective modes of communications in use and opt for an environment of collaborative communications. It isn’t just about integrating several modes of communication, and it’s foundational. Collaborative communication is all about creating a highly desired unified user experience and allowing a transformation so that people can collaborate, communicate, and share content inefficiently.

The Collaborative communication platforms are a unifying experience across video, audio, online meetings, and more, with team messaging as fundamental. All and all, collaborative communication is all about enabling greater skill and productivity to the workforce, leveraging a functional cloud-based conversational platform that supports artificial intelligence, chatbots and integrations. Moreover, the cloud-based single platform would lead to better workflow, improved productivity, reduced timing, and easier remote working.

#3 Team Messaging: Fundamental to the future of the Digital workplace

Collaborative communications allow enterprises to provide the full capabilities of collaboration anywhere, on any device, any place, through an organisation-focused communications platform. Furthermore, collaborative communication emphasises the people and not on technology. It means that employees are more able to connect with the right individuals within a company at the right date and time, using the most appropriate form of communication. It improves productivity as creativity increases.

The team messaging applications are progressively rising as the effective collaborative communications for modern workplaces employees. The 43% of CITE research respondents indicate that the team messaging app is their top mode of communications. It is one of the least disruptive forms of collaboration platforms at work, and it most likely saves 40-60 minutes a day.

Here are the few main points from the No Jitter Team collaboration survey:

• More than 90% of respondents experience that employee within the organisation use more than one team messaging application.
• Around 88% of all respondents said they expected an increase in team users within the next few months.
• And for above 95% of respondents, team messaging applications are one of the necessary components of their future collaboration strategies.

#4 Creating a Blueprint for Collaborative Communication

As you’re thinking about how good it is to establish an environment of collaborative communications within your organisation, determining the right technology is one of the challenging tasks. Choosing the level of programming expertise depending upon the need could be costly if outside resources are required. However, the ideal choice of selecting a reliable communications provider is that it should offer a cloud-based platform that supports various conversational modes that makes easy work integration.

As you thinking of getting the best collaborative communication at your company, let’s look at the five key points while choosing potential providers.

User Experience

One of the first goals is to find a communication and collaboration platform that can provide a consistent experience across all modes. Find platforms that provide a unifying experience and similar functionalities whether employees are using the tools from their mobile devices, desktops, or other web browsers.

Customisation

Consider a platform that provides a customised experience for your unique work environment. In simple words, it can help you integrate team messaging with unified communication (UC). In addition, it should incorporate your customer helpdesk system with ease and let users customise workflows in their office spaces.

Security

Security is one of the primary and highly important factors to consider while evaluating team collaboration applications. Also, according to Jitter survey respondents, security is the No. 1 decision factor when it comes to choosing collaboration solutions. It is important to protect the crucial content in a platform while in transit or at rest. Before deciding, make sure you check all the parameters of compliance standards, as well.

Search

In this case, the value lies that you can search across all conversations, regardless of the format and get results that are enriched with context details.

Personalisation

Finally, don’t miss the “fun” elements. The collaboration apps must enable users to personalise their conversations, sending gifs, sharing emoticons to show their feelings beyond words.

#5 An All-in-One User Experience

Since the demand for business communications and collaboration continues to evolve, Workanywhere, a leading partner of RingCentral, has established itself as a number one cloud communications provider globally. It has introduced the concept of a unified experience for business communications, including voice, video, team messaging and group meetings in a single platform. Cloud providers like Workanywhere help enhance the workflow of today’s remote employees as well.

About Workanywhere

Workanywhere is a leading partner of RingCentral, and it offers cloud-based unified collaboration and communication applications for enterprises. The RingCentral provides an cloud phone system, VoIP phones, and Virtual PBX to all businesses with increased flexibility and cost-effectiveness.