A recent report by digital marketing agency Semetrical revealed an upward trend of Google searches related to unified communications and collaboration. The agency said it analyzed keywords relevant to what it calls ‘core products and services provided by companies within the IT communications industry,’ searches it said are in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.’ The agency hoped to show how IT conferencing solutions have become a ‘top priority’ for many UK businesses amid the pandemic, but it also gave further validation into a greater, more global trend of companies flocking to cloud-based unified communications and collaboration software to accommodate remote working.
According to the Office of National Statistics, only five percent of the UK workforce had a remote working lifestyle at the beginning of 2020. ONS said data further reveals, of the 32.6 million employees in the UK, almost two million reported working ‘mostly’ from home.’ Roughly four million reported saying they worked from home a week prior to taking the survey.
The ONS found, nine million people said they had worked from home before; making it, still, less than 30 percent of the total workforce in the UK that could actually work from home. Some industrial sectors, the ONS found, including transportation, storage, accommodation, food services, wholesale, retail, and repair, have fewer ‘work from home opportunities.’Many industries are capable of enabling remote working during COVID-19, and here’s what those hoping to go digital have looked for using the popular search engine.
According to ‘Semetrical,’ it found a ‘significant surge’ in Google searches for ‘Video Conferencing,’ with a 1,075 percent increase in the number of searches performed between January and April 2020. Searches for ‘Audio Conferencing’ also saw an 823 percent rise during the same time frame.
‘Web Conferencing’ related searches increased by 809 percent, eight times the normal amount of queries usually performed. ‘Unified Communications’ and ‘Digital Transformation’ have too, seen an up to fifteen percent increase in UK Google queries. Among the country’s most popular search terms are ‘Remote Working’ and ‘Webinars,’ which both saw a nearly seventy-three percent rise between January to April 2020.
For years, we’ve seen a growing trend toward what’s coined ‘Digital Transformation.’ Largely driven by cloud adoption, which offers scalability, agility, and mobility. In more recent years, there’s been an increasing demand for digital transformation for businesses wanting to stay with the times and efficient, expressly as more seek better working conditions such as remote working.
These search trend upticks for UC & C systems indicate that there is a ‘significant increase in companies searching for IT communications providers in response to the impact of COVID-19,’ the agency said in a statement.
Out of all the uncertainty this period presents, what is clear is that the COVID-19 pandemic will likely have profound impacts on the way we conduct business well into the future. It will probably fundamentally transform the way we collaborate in the workplace, as well as in our personal lives. This is something even most experts can agree on, the effects of which, we’ve only just begun to see.
