After years of promise, enterprise-grade FMC solutions are increasingly available.
Despite the growth and maturation of the unified communications market over the last several years one truth remains: employees still prefer the native app on their mobile phone for calling, across all use cases, compared to using mobile and desktop apps from their UC vendors.
Metrigy’s global Workplace Collaboration: 2023-24 study of 440 organizations, published in March of 2023, found that almost 12% of companies, mostly small businesses, had switched from a traditional business calling platform to simply allowing employees to use their own mobile phones, or the provisioning of company-owned mobile phones for calling.
The problem with this approach is that companies may lack control over phone numbers, the ability to integrate mobile calls with apps for customer relationship management, and the ability to enforce security and compliance controls on calls and messages. Last year, the SEC levied multibillion dollar fines financial services companies in the US for allowing customer communications without compliance controls, and the lack of employer ability to ensure industry compliance on employees’ private devices shows the “BYOD” approach to mobile calling simply isn’t supportable.
Earlier research we conducted in 2021 found that only around 5% of companies who had provisioned mobile UC apps found that employees were using them for calling. Instead, mobile UC apps were primarily being used for messaging and for the joining of meetings when away from a desk. Clearly, there is a gap in user preferences when it comes to the available tools for business communications (such as a business calling platform) and the tools employees prefer (their own phones).
Our research also shows that demand for FMC is high, with almost 24% of our 440 research participants planning to deploy FMC solutions this year, and another 45.6% either planning a future deployment, or evaluating FMC for possible use.
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