More corporates are exploring multi-channel customer relationship management (CRM) strategies that will harness web chat, instant messaging (IM), video conferencing and mobile text to communicate with customers, suppliers and business partners.

A survey released today by the Economic Intelligence Unit (EIU) found that 73% for senior corporate executives believe better collaboration to be the most important benefit of voice/data convergence.

It appears that few of them know how to go about implementing the systems to support this collaboration however, with just 8% currently running contact centres on IP networks however, though 39% said they would migrate to IP telephony in the next two years.

Nearly 50% say they will have started using video conferencing within the same time period compared with just 9% today, with 42% adopting web chat or IM compared to 16% currently.

Lloyd Salvage, UK sales centre vice president for carrier AT&T, which sponsored the research, said that companies may be using basic IP telephony, rather than advanced features.

"It’s a bit difficult to believe that contact centres are not getting calls on their computers over the LAN, but they may be using traditional systems with some form of intelligent routing, like Genesys, rather than a full utilisation of converged voice/data technology." He said.

"Video conferencing is seen as a sustainable, highly efficient and usable service now as opposed to when it was ISDN based and 70% of the time you were almost guaranteed it wasn't going to work." added Salvage.

Andy Mulholland, global chief technology officer at services firm Capgemini, agreed that more organisations are starting to explore alternatives to email and more traditional forms of interaction, partly because of a cultural shift and partly to make the best of new technology and available resources.

"It's much more natural to use IM to comment on things and understand how to collaborate in a structured way rather than just bang email at each other, which is a singular wasteful use of every resource going." He said.

The EIU based its conclusions on interviews with 236 senior executives worldwide, 25% of whom were based in Europe. The top five industry sectors represented were professional services, financial services, manufacturing, technology and healthcare and pharmaceuticals.