Abstract. Integrated communication is an effective strategic tool that enables creating and maintaining tight dialogue and cooperation between service providers and consumers, managing communication chaos, information flow, matching consumers' needs. Its successful application requires reorganizing the communication processes, implementing their strategic changes, introducing new attitudes towards work and new culture, striving for overall synergy. Under such changes, this article aims at identifying the hurdles hindering the effective integration of smooth service providers and consumers' communication. Testing hypotheses based on a survey demonstrates that hurdles reflecting employees' competences, integrated communication development resources and result evaluation are more frequent in the stage of communication channel integration than in the functional one.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.