Business Communication Digitalized: Accelerated Transformations under the New Normal

Abstract

Two years have passed since we first heard of the coronavirus, and our work and personal lives are now a far cry from what they once were. Companies have adapted to a “new normal,” one that acknowledges that the new virus is here to stay. This new context has forced them to turn to non-face-to-face strategies for customer marketing, internal and external communication, and the overall business process (Uzialko, 2021). These new work environments are accelerating digital transformation, expanding the role of information and communication technology (ICT) plays in companies of all fields (Blackburn, LaBerge, O’Toole, & Schneider, 2020). The move toward digitalization in business communication and the general work environment is not a recent phenomenon. Years before the pandemic, the growing reach of ICT and big data analyses had been receiving attention in both academic and mainstream venues. Topics of discussion included chatbot communication with customers and the expanding scope of automation via robotic process automation (RPA), which not only replaces simple formal tasks but also handles unstructured tasks using coworking systems between employees (Adamopoulou & Moussiades, 2020; Heo & Lee, 2018). In this era of social distancing, communication with customers is more important than ever. With this growth of communication, however, there has been a growing need to integrate messages from various channels, such as chatting, notifications, phone calls, e-mails, and short message services (SMS). The pandemic has also caused a rise in the use of smart work systems as a growing number of companies have been allowing their employees to work remotely (International Labour Organization, 2020). Business coworking systems now offer messaging, scheduling, project status sharing, file sharing, and communication in one place independent of where employees may be in the world. Many major companies in fields such as finance, manufacturing, law, and health care are introducing business coworking systems into their workforce, and the numbers of companies following suit only seem to be growing. Many companies have begun to introduce software robots in the process of automating segments of their business to allow their employees to focus on more valuable tasks rather than spend their time on repetitive ones. Software “bots” can work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Their productivity is twice as high as that of people, as they can work five times longer than an average person, thus supplying about 10 times the working labor. Once artificial intelligence (AI) is incorporated into these bots, their efficiency will increase by 25 times. These changes are expected to bring dramatic improvements to human productivity while addressing the problems of aging populations and labor shortages. If traditional RPA innovated blue-collar sectors by taking over repetitive tasks, RPAI (RPA + AI) has the potential to innovate white-collar ones, allowing humanity to discover new areas of intelligence (Shin, 2019). BCRP has thus published a special issue that includes case studies of ICT companies in an effort to better understand how they are using innovative platform strategies in response to the “new normal.” These four companies – Uracle, which enhances Received: Jan 5, 2022 Revised: Jan 18, 2022 Accepted: Jan 20, 2022 Corresponding author: Hyejung Chang School of Management, Kyung Hee University, 26 Kyungheedae-ro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 02447, Korea Tel: +82-2-961-9432, E-mail: hjchang@khu.ac.kr