Dive Brief:
- Reports of the looming demise of the desk phone may be greatly exaggerated, CIO reported. In a survey conducted in May 2015 by RingCentral, 65% of workers who received a desk phone preferred using that to make and receive business calls. Only 30% preferred using their mobile phone.
- Millennials may be the reason some are heralding the desk phone’s supposed end. In another 2015 survey, only 6.5% of respondents between ages 25 and 34 say they are comfortable using a phone – and a full 72% of those aged between 16 and 24 are actually scared to use the phone, CIO reported.
- Due to these changing preferences, businesses will need to adopt a “blend of communication styles” to accommodate the different preferences of their workforce – a multi-modal communications strategy that includes a desk phone.
Dive Insight:
About 83% of workers were issued a desk phone with their own personal number according to the RingCentral survey.
"Anecdotally, I see a lot of workers using their cell phone; texting, emailing and messaging as well as for business calls, even if they're sitting right next to their desk phone - so that 65% figure was surprising,” Curtis Peterson, senior vice president of operations at telecommunications provider RingCentral, told CIO.
While they had no demographic data to back it up, Peterson guessed that of the 30% who preferred using the mobile phone to do business, most of them were probably millennials. That means effective company communications will need to involve a combination of different approaches, allowing the use of mobile messaging and landline phone calls, among other forms.
