When a company representative communicates with that same customer on another channel, they have no idea what the customer’s concerns are.Īs I explained in a recent column for Nasdaq, it’s no surprise that customers say one of their biggest gripes is having to repeat information. What a customer says in one channel often stays there. App sprawl (which includes “ SaaS sprawl ”) drags down both internal collaboration and external communications. When conversations are broken up into so many different places, daily losses ensue. And having so many opportunities to share ideas and discuss possibilities with coworkers can boost opportunities for collaboration.īut this disorganized system causes major problems. Being reachable and accessible to clients and customers is crucial for B2B and B2C companies of any size. The chance to interact in so many different ways does have benefits, of course. Even individual departments within companies were using up to 60. By last year, companies were using more than 200 on average.
But when businesses suddenly shifted their operations for remote work, they picked up all sorts of new apps. As of 2018, large companies were already using an average of 129 apps, while smaller businesses used 73. This has been a growing problem for years, but it was exacerbated by the pandemic. If someone were to join just one of these conversations, there’s a good chance they’d have no idea what the people in it were talking about.
They take place in silos across dozens of different platforms, each of which on its own lacks the full context. So, unfortunately, the vast majority of these conversations end up in separate threads. But it has become an unmanageable deluge. Businesses have tried to keep up by being available across as many channels as possible, both for coworkers to collaborate and for clients or customers to reach out. Now, brick-and-mortar visits and phone calls join email, video meetings, chat, text, social media, messenger applications and other apps. The idea of instantaneous communication as a standard feature of business had not set in. Just ten years ago in 2012, less than 40% of Americans owned a smartphone. In fact, as of 2001, not even half the U.S. It’s a new reality that was largely unforeseeable just two decades ago. The ideas, perspectives, concerns and desires that staff, providers, clients and customers express in all these conversations - many of which take place digitally - are the keys to unlocking solutions and new innovations. In this era, conversations are by far the most rich, powerful sources of information that businesses have to work with. By Tomas Gorny, co-founder and CEO at Nextiva