Human communication is not a soft issue. When communication fails, businesses lose people, trust, reputation and money.

Organizations have invested heavily in digitalization, automation and AI to make communication faster, more efficient and scalable. But efficiency does not automatically create understanding.

Poor communication comes at a real cost. Research by Grammarly and The Harris Poll estimates that ineffective communication may cost U.S. businesses as much as $1.2 trillion annually in wasted labor hours. ¹

And communication is not simply a communication-team issue. McKinsey & Company’s research into digital transformation shows that technology is only part of what determines whether transformation succeeds. In its 2018 Global Survey, only 16 percent of respondents reported digital transformations that both improved performance and sustained those improvements over time. The practices associated with successful transformations fell into five areas: leadership, capability building, empowering people, upgrading tools and communication. ²

Importantly, McKinsey also found that successful organizations tended to deploy more technology, not less. The message is therefore not that digitalization is the problem. Technology can optimize processes, increase efficiency and transform the way organizations work.

Technology alone, however, is not enough.

Especially when communication becomes complex, uncertain or emotionally charged, the human factor matters. Meaning can get lost between sender, system and receiver. People interpret messages differently, departments become misaligned, employees disengage and customers lose trust.

Technology is not the problem. Losing the human in communication is.

Because no matter how advanced our systems become, communication ultimately still depends on humans understanding other humans.

That is where Viavox Human Stories | Business begins.

We help organizations identify where the human connection is being lost in their communication — between leaders and employees, between departments, and between organizations and their customers — and help them redesign that communication around human understanding, trust and connection.

Through Viavox Human Stories | Business, we translate this principle into concrete solutions for human communication in business — helping organizations make their communication not only more efficient, but more human.

Human Stories. The human response to an artificial world.

¹ Grammarly & The Harris Poll (2022), The State of Business Communication: The Backbone of Business Is Broken.
² McKinsey & Company (2018), Unlocking success in digital transformations.