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The Brockmann & Company report, The Perfect Storm: Why Video Conferencing Will Dominate Business Communications, introduces the framework for accelerating the adoption of video communications in business.

The video conferencing experience is changing. It’s becoming more natural, higher quality and lower cost than ever before. Through the convergence of network updates, equipment innovations and high user expectations from home entertainment systems using HDTV and surround sound, the elements are present for a ‘Perfect Storm’ in video conferencing.

As is our practice with benchmark reports, Brockmann & Company segments user results along the critical performance variable, in this case, of video conferencing consumption, excluding those respondents not reporting usage, from least to most intensive users. Comparing the business metrics reported for the 15.9% most intensive users and the least intensive 15.9% of users reveals how strongly video conferencing is an indicator for better business performance. In terms of video conferencing consumption, the Top Performers invested 50 times more time in video conferences than the Poor Performers.

This translates into superior business performance for Top Performers as compared to Poor Performers:

• 20% more very satisfied customers
• 72% more very satisfied employees
• 85% more revenue per employee
• 20% more market share
• 5.5 times higher satisfaction with the conferencing experience

So, there are compelling business reasons to invest in video conferencing, to improve the productivity and speed of collaborations and therefore accelerate the business itself. 

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A particularly important business-to-business communication of interest to Brockmann & Company is the so-called ‘first contact’. Like the Paramount Pictures film of the same name, the first time a prospective buyer reaches out and contacts a vendor is particularly important because it represents an opportunity to influence, opportunity to sell and opportunity to be judged by the most important person in a potential business-to-business interaction, the customer. First contacts in this direction are many times more valuable to business because the prospect has already self-qualified themselves and are predisposed to a sales-oriented discussion.

Brockmann & Company results in the report, First Contact: Using Email to Win Customers More Often show that:

• Human accessibility on the website is important to buyers since it increases brand perceptions for 83% of buyers. It is recommended that webmasters should enable ‘open contact’ for sales and support professionals or executives. Open contact is the process of posting the name, email and telephone number of actual sales, executive or support personnel on the company website. This greatly improves the buyers’ perception of the vendors’ brands.
• Unsolicited tele-marketing has greater responsiveness rates than unsolicited email or leaving voicemail.
• A vendor using challenge-response technology has a more positive brand impression than a vendor catching customers’ email in spam filters, or a vendor that ignores first contacts altogether.

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In our report, The Spam Index, users specified their anti-spam technology choices. Our results showed that significantly lower spam and significantly less time spent dealing with spam came to those users relying on challenge-response technologies.