All businesses need a reliable communications system to connect with colleagues, customers and partners — particularly with today’s increasingly distributed and mobile workforces. That’s why unified communications solutions that enhance connections across multiple channels have become a business necessity.

There is near-unanimous agreement among small to midsized businesses (SMBs) that collaboration tools are now essential to operations. In a recent Techaisle survey, 96 percent of SMBs ranked improved collaboration as their second-most important IT priority, just behind cloud.

Online collaboration tools have been a lifeline for employees working remotely. Voice and video conferencing, instant messaging, chat and other tools enable workers to stay connected, share information, make decisions and serve customers.

But the rapid transition to remote work caused many organizations to implement collaboration tools in an ad hoc manner.

According to the State of Remote Work report from Buffer, 99 percent of workers would prefer to work remotely at least some of the time until they retire. That’s just about everybody. Another study from FlexJobs and Global Workplace Analytics found that remote work increased by 44 percent in five years and more than 90 percent in 10 years.

A recent report from Eastern Management Group found that more than half of all surveyed organizations are considering the adoption of a hosted unified communications solution to replace their aging phone system. The top reasons for adoption of Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) solutions focus on popular capabilities such as VoIP, mobility, presence and collaboration tools.

If there has been one perceived drawback to advances in communication technology, it has been that emailing, texting and instant messaging has replaced face-to-face communication. As a result, relationships aren’t as strong as in the past. Thanks to the emergence of video conferencing as a core collaboration technology, this trend is being reversed.

What do your customers want? Are you providing it? These may be the two most important questions any business can ask about its operations, but a new study suggests most won’t like the answers.

According to Forrester’s 2018 U.S. Customer Experience (CX) Index, the vast majority of businesses across all sectors don’t seem to fully understand what matters to their customers.

People today can get things done from just about anywhere at any time — you could start the day by checking email from a tablet, then update a project proposal from a laptop, and finally use an app such as Yammer or Chatter to communicate with colleagues via a smartphone.