Collaboration is essential in today’s fast-paced competitive environment. It’s the connective tissue of the customer experience ecosystem. Sixty-one percent of today’s information workers those who use a computer at least 1 hour a day regularly communicate with colleagues, business partners, and customers. Product managers instant message with suppliers to answer quick inventory questions. A marketing team drives a new website design using voice, video, and web conferencing with a design agency. While collaboration technologies are not new, there is room for improvement to increase their impact and business value. In December 2015, Cisco commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the use and benefits of collaboration technologies within small and medium-size businesses (SMBs). To further explore this trend, Forrester developed a hypothesis that SMBs want to support a broad range of work styles and locations with collaboration technologies that allow employees to seamlessly message, meet, and call. In conducting in-depth surveys with 606 IT and business decision-makers in companies with between 20 and 999 employees, Forrester found that these companies improved operational efficiency while addressing rising customer expectations as a result of deploying unified communications (UC) technologies.
Forrester Diversity of Deployment
