33 awesome business communication tools and checklist to choose them
The importance of business communications in the workplace is growing by the day due to the pandemic and consequent growth of remote work. The emergence of remote work and dispersed workforce is forcing many organizations to do a complete rethink of their existing communication processes and tools. Whether you are working from home or office, you know how important it is to communicate with your co-workers.
Implementing business communication tools at the workplace has become one of the most important business priorities in 2021. Businesses that invest in modern workplace communication technologies see a huge jump in productivity. According to McKinsey, employee productivity increases 20–25% in organizations where employees are highly connected.
Today’s business communication tools are helping companies become more agile, drive innovations and achieve better workforce productivity. Web-based business communication tools play an important role in employee engagement, retention, motivation, and attracting talent to an organization.
Tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams that were easy and convenient to use at the beginning slowly turned out to be major irritants. These tools constantly force you to pay attention to the chats going on in their channels, even though many of the communication are irrelevant to you. Getting constantly distracted reduces productivity as you get very less time to do your core job.
Best business communication tools
Business communication tools are critical for organizations to succeed. One of the main communications challenges that most organizations are facing today is the silo effect where departments, teams or even employees from the same team don’t communicate enough. Workplace communication statistics show that 86% of employees and executives cite the lack of effective communication as the main causes for workplace failures. The main reason for this is a majority of organizations are using business communication tools that are disparate and disjointed. They are not effective or reliable.
Also, the business communication tools used by organizations are woefully inadequate in handling the steadily growing remote workforce. A study points out that 56% of employees don’t get the right tools to perform their day-to-day activities. By switching to a Saas-based business communication tools companies can save in multiple ways. According to a study, organizations that are able to handle their business communication effectively can increase their productivity by as much as 25% and if their business communication tool could handle remote workers effectively, they can save as much as 78% on annual operating expenses. Here is a list of best business communication tools that will help you boost productivity by improving employee engagement and overcoming all communication challenges.
1. Clariti
Clariti brings all communications to one place including emails, chats, calendar events, to-dos, and calls. Clariti also connects all related communications as if it is one conversation. There is no need to shift between many apps and there is no need to stress trying to remember all the connected conversations in memory. Clariti eliminates the need to search across many apps looking for information and makes it very easy to see the big picture without any effort. Clariti allows you to put any item such as email, conference chat, social feeds, and To-Do inside a Clariti TopicFolder. All the subsequent related conversations are automatically stored in that TopicFolder. Few months down the line, when you want to go back and refer to a prior conversation or file, all you have to do is look inside the relevant TopicFolder. No matter what was discussed and when it was discussed, you will be able to see the big picture in one view. This is not possible with other digital communication apps where all the information is siloed.
Clariti is ideal for small and medium businesses to boost team collaboration and drive productivity. It is securely hosted on Amazon Web Services, providing total reliability, 100% uptime, and trusted security of all your workday data. Clariti a free cloud-based tool that can be accessed from anywhere with a browser and internet connection.
2. OurPeople
OurPeople is a platform designed to improve communication within teams. It allows management to engage with each executive through messaging. Users can create custom tags to reach out to any specific employee or the entire team.
3. Smarp
Smarp is a cloud-based office communication platform designed to help businesses manage employee engagement and share information with external and internal stakeholders.
4. Beekeeper
Beekeeper is a cloud-based employee communication and collaboration solution optimized for remote and field workers. It supports omni-channel communication tools for mobile workforces. Users can send group messages, conduct surveys and share news and other updates. A built-in chat messenger enables employees to chat with their peers as well as share documents, images, videos and links.
5. Jive
Jive is a central hub for internal communications, employee collaboration, organizational knowledge, documents and more. With its highly engaging user experience on both desktop and mobile devices, Jive drives increased intranet adoption, employee satisfaction and productivity.
6. SweetHive
SweetHive is designed to manage all the people, from colleagues, clients and suppliers through both a single channel and selective communication. SweetHive allows you to have 360° views of the contents, from general to detail. That permits you to be focused on your business without missing anything important, even if you are working from home.
7. Happeo
Happeo is an intranet software focused on improving internal communications. It integrates exclusively with G Suite and provides users with content management capabilities, employee engagement analytics, permission management to the rest of the Google tools suite.
8. theEMPLOYEEapp
theEMPLOYEEapp is a communications solution that enables businesses to engage with employees and share important information on a centralized platform. It provides mobile applications for Android and iOS devices, which helps professionals add upcoming events on personal calendars, interact with colleagues and stream videos, even from remote locations.
9. OnSemble
OnSemble is more than just a communication software. It keeps everyone connected — it’s a digital workplace that makes employees feel valued. OnSemble can help companies to transform, communicate, collaborate, and connect.
10. Skype
Using Skype, you can connect to anyone from anywhere. Calls can be made to a person’s mobile phone and their landline. It also allows for sending text messages with end-to-end encryption so you can rest assured your conversations are private. You can use it on a multitude of devices like your PC, tablet, or smartphone.
11. Asana
Asana is a cloud-based project management tool that is capable of hosting real-time communication for multiple users. Instead of using emails for general announcements and another application such as instant-messaging tools for informal chats, Asana handles both, allowing users to save time and cut costs.
12. HipChat
HipChat is one of the best on-premise instant messaging tools. HipChat enables your team to work better together by making it easy to share ideas, updates, code and files in real-time, anywhere.
13. Salesforce Chatter
Chatter is a Salesforce real-time collaboration application that lets users work together, talk to each other, and share information. Chatter connects, engages, and motivates users to work efficiently across the organization, regardless of role or location.
14. Viber
Viber is more than a smartphone app; but also works directly on your PC. It’s more than a messaging app as it offers numerous calling and messaging features. You can choose voice or video calls, especially if you need a face-to-face call. Group chats and calls are also possible with Viber. While many will use this from their smartphone, you can sync it will your PC to transfer all your calls.
15. Jitsi
Jitsi is a free and open-source tool that allows video conferencing for both your smartphone and PC. It allows for live streaming and recording. It’s simple, secure, and scalable for when your business gets bigger.
16. Google Hangouts
Google Hangouts is easy to use whether you’re talking with one person or a group of people. Some of its great features are voice and video calls, chat, video conferencing, multimedia messaging, events, and live-streaming meetings. You can connect with up to ten people around the world.
17. Cisco Webex Team
Cisco Webex Teams goes beyond a conventional instant messaging and provides added voice and video calling capabilities. Cisco Webex is an app for continuous teamwork. Move work forward in secure workspaces where everyone can contribute at any time with messaging, file sharing, white-boarding, video meetings, calling and more. It works on virtually any device.
18. TeamViewer Meeting
Apart from just instant messaging, TeamViewer Meeting lets you hold face-to-face HD VoIP videoconferences and audio calling, with your coworkers or your entire team, scheduled group meetings (up to 300 people), desktop screen sharing and session recording. It has all the essential meeting tools to collaborate securely with your teams and clients, from anywhere, anytime. TeamViewer Meeting installs on your desktop or mobile phone for quick access.
19. Workplace
Workplace developed by Facebook is more than just an instant messaging platform. It facilitates online groupwork, instant messaging, video conferencing, mobile app, video chat, instant messaging, unlimited file storage space, desktop notifications and news sharing etc.
20. Chatwork
Chatwork is an all-round instant messaging chat app that is designed to help global teams communicate, collaborate and increase productivity. The platform includes secure messaging, video chat, task management and file sharing functionality.
21. Troop Messenger
Troop Messenger is one of the most comprehensive office chat application with amazing security, facilitating safe and secured business data sharing. It offers a collaborative work forum for businesses. This business chat application is one among all group chat apps which comes with unlimited group creation. It is not only instant messaging for business but also lets you share files of diverse format along with current location and contacts.
22. RingCentral Glip
RingCentral Glip Pro is a free, unlimited, easy-to-use instant messaging tool that also offers high quality and high-availability video and audio conferencing, seamlessly integrated with team messaging, file sharing, contact, task, and calendar management — resulting in a Smart Video Meetings experience.
23. Discord
Discard does more than what an instant messaging software does. Using Discord, you can create a home for your communities and friends, where you can stay close and have fun over text, voice, and video.
24. Amazon Chime
Amazon Chime lets you go beyond instant messaging. It lets you choose the communication options that are best suited for your business. You have the option to choose from meetings, chat, and business calling or use Voice Connector to direct your voice traffic over the internet. With Amazon Chime, you have the flexibility to choose the communication option that fits with your business needs, and the freedom to scale up or down as needed.
25. Flowdock
Flowdock brings all of your conversations, work items and tools into one place. Using Flowdock you can prioritize work, solve problems, search and organize across teams, locations and time zones. Flowdock is available in both iOS App Store and Android Store.
26. Jandi
Jandi helps your team to easily organize work group chats, smart search files and more in a single unified platform — Chat, collaborate & unlimited video calls. Using Jandi you can search by keyword, chat room, file type, date etc.
27. Mattermost
Mattermost brings all your team communication into one place, making it searchable and accessible anywhere. You can use Mattermost from your iOS or Android phones and tablets or with installed apps on Windows, Linux and Mac.
28. Yammer
Yammer revolutionizes internal communications by bringing together all employees inside a private and secure enterprise social network. Connect with people across your organization to make better decisions, faster. Allows all employees to know what’s happening day-to-day as well as build on the work of others. Employees will be able to create groups relevant to work and other interests, along with keeping documents or photos in context while still discussing things online.
29. Whispir
Whispir is one of the best web-based business communications tools that uses cutting edge technology to bring all your communications channels like email, SMS, voice and web chatting together in one easily accessible space for rich two-way multi-channel communications.
30. MiCloud
MiCloud is a web-based business communication tool that helps businesses manage calls, chats, events, audio/video web conferencing, and screen sharing. MiCloud Connect lets you move communications and collaboration to the cloud with confidence.
31. Crugo
Crugo is an all in one, secure communication platform that increases team productivity by streamlining communications and organizing them more effectively. Crugo provides businesses with the ability to instant message in real time, share files, maintain task lists, organize and store files, share calendars and monitor RSS news feeds all in a single tool, available cross-platform.
32. AlertMedia
Using AlertMedia you can engage in secure, real-time, two-way interactions with any size audience over any channel, to any device, anywhere in the world in a matter of seconds. AlertMedia’s easy-to-use interface enables you to communicate with your employees and associated audiences via text, voice, email, app push notifications, social, conference call, and custom channels while getting real-time reports and insight. AlertMedia is modern, reliable, and secure.
33. Talkspirit
Talkspirit is one of the best solutions to boost your internal communication. It brings all your employees together in a secure online space, wherever they are, even without an email address. By centralizing your news, events, documents and discussions in one place, Talkspirit provides a better way to spread the culture, share values and connect across the company. Talkspirit is available in 8 languages.
By signing up for these business communication tools discussed above, you can boost employee engagement, collaborate seamlessly with your remote team and boost your productivity.
The business communication tools discussed above will not only help your business to stay afloat but also make it thrive by improving the engagement, efficiency and productivity of your team during these difficult times.
Checklist to choose the best tools
Your business communication tool should have certain key features (read as checklist) to be able to support your entire team irrespective of its size and geographic location.
1. No communication silos
Many organizations use one tool for email, and many different tools for chat, shared documents, and social media management. While these tools are helpful, the lack of connection between them reduces productivity due to the time spent switching between them and searching for information in disconnected silos. A good communication tool must keep all related communications linked be it chat, email, documents, to dos and social feeds.
2. Integrated Apps
Aggregating disconnected communication tools in one aggregation app won’t work. Users still use multiple apps and the information is still disconnected. The ideal business communication tool must not only have all information accessible from one place, but the related information from all tools must be connected.
3. Access from anywhere
Face-to-face meetings are slowly becoming a thing of the past and 95% of the workforce are keen to use online business communication tools instead of in-person meetings. You need cloud-based communication software that can be accessed from anywhere.
4. No training necessary
The business communication tool that you are using should be easy to use and easy to adopt.
5. Sound security
When you have thousands of employees sending emails, messages, sharing, downloading files, and having remote conferences, you should make sure that your data is safe.
6. Time consuming search
Though applications like Teams and Slack bring all communications like group chat, audio and video calling in one place, the related communications are not connected, which means you will have to search multiple channels to get the information.
7. Managing external communication
You may be using two different communication tools, one for your internal communications and other for external communications. This creates communication silos. The tool that you are using should allow you to communicate freely with both internal and external stakeholders.
8. Integrating audio calling
If you are working remote, you are likely to have calls all through the day. Using a separate tool for audio calling is cumbersome and time consuming. Hence the tool that you are using should have this feature in-built.
9. Constant distraction from chat channels
Please make sure your application has an option to enable ‘Do Not Disturb’ or ‘Mute’ feature so that you can avoid distractions and concentrate on core work.
10. Avoid multiple integrations
Slack boasts of providing integrations with at least 1,000 applications. More tools will only create communication silos. If everybody in the team is not tech savvy, you will need dedicated resources to help you with all the integrations. So, go for a unified business communication tool.
11. Ability to support multiple file formats
The business communication tool that you are using should have the ability to view any data file like (.jpeg, .png, .bmp, .txt and .pdf) in the browser with one-click.
12. Built-in document viewer
While most of the web-based communication tools will allow you view some documents, support for viewing documents created by the Microsoft Office suite is not always available.
13. Pinning important items
While most of the business communication tools available in the market will allow you to flag important mails for reminder and further action, their scope is limited to emails only. Your tool should allow you to pin any important communication item.
14. Social Feeds integration
Social media is increasingly becoming an important tool in digital marketing and for getting instant feedback from customers. Unfortunately, social media feeds are independent of your other communication, creating silos. The business communication tool that you are using should allow you to integrate with social media.
15. Creating context-based To-dos
While most of the business communication tools will allow you create to-dos, they are disconnected from any context that caused you to create the to-do in the first place. The business communication tool that you are using should allow you create to-dos that are linked to your emails, chats and documents related to that to-do. Later when the to-do is triggered, all you have to do is look at the items related to that to-do in one place to understand why the to-do was created.
We hope the checklist discussed above will help you choose the best business communication tool that will help you to overcome communication challenges that every team faces — coordinate across different time zones, manage information silos and overcoming language and cultural barriers.
