Business Communication Trends Over the past 15 years communication technologies have made significant strides to make communication faster, easier, and more cost effective. Being on the frontlines of the computer industry I had the chance to witness how significantly the impact has been on my day-to-day business life, along with making companies more efficient at communicating to staff and customers. The biggest change to communication has been the Internet. With the introduction of websites, blog, e-mail, and social media …show more content…
Over the past seven years we have seen our North American business shift drastically to the Internet. Both our customer enrollment and purchasing have moved to the Internet at about a nine to 10 percent increase per year. This has allowed us to increase revenue and customer base without the need to increase our call center staff to handle the increased business. USANA has not seen the same growth and Internet usage growth in our Asia Pacific market. Our customer in Asia Pacific market still want to have the human contact whether is face-to-face or over the phone with the staff in the area. The marketing department for USANA has done a research on this subject and has found the trend can be attributed to two factors. The first factor is availability and cost of broadband Internet in most Asian countries. Most Asia countries have a poor Internet infrastructure and where broadband Internet is available it has expensive. The other is the need for interpersonal contact with the company. The second factor was the that Asian customers want to have the personal contact with the employees at the offices. It gives them the feeling that someone cares, and they are not just another number to the company. USANA also has begun to leverage social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to communicate business news and deals quickly to customers. They are also using these sites to help with training the quickly expanding customer