When technology developed and we started to use emails, it was like magic. Life in the office seemed to get much easier.
Although email is certainly not dead, it’s not a very efficient way for many types of business communication.
Remember when the first thing you did in the morning was checking your emails?
What’s the first thing you check today? Yeah, I thought so. Social media.
And not only social media, but the newer social collaboration software applications trump the effectiveness of emails most of the time as well.
Don’t believe me? Let’s see some reasons why email is no longer the best form of communication in a company:
Time Wastage
In most companies where email is the main communication platform, the employees use a great deal of their time going through their emails for company’s updates.
Most times they end up being overwhelmed by the multitude of messages in their inboxes. It isn’t economical for the company when employees have to spend 25% of their time at work going through emails which are mostly not even that useful.
If social networking is adopted for a company’s communication, Updates from all the departments are gotten almost at the same time. The time that is spent on emails could be spent doing some more productive activities.
Attachments? Where again?
Documents that are sent via email will be in different messages in the inbox. There will be no organization of the documents received from a certain sender over time. There are ways to organize emails, but it’s just way too confusing when you want to find a specific document or attachment.
In a social work platform, documents received from one sender or groups are always put in individual folders instead of individual messages. This becomes much easier when it comes to handling documents in different departments of a company.
It’s really hard to track what’s going on
In a working environment, seniors need to have the possibility of checking into every activity, every new development or the progress of every project the company has to work on.
Imagine wanting to find out what’s happening in one of your pipelines or a certain client. Do you email the account manager to ask? Firstly, it will take a while to get an answer. Second, you interrupt him in his work and give him an additional email to answer.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just log in and see anything you need with a few clicks?
Email is a Poor task Manager
Emails may require you to open several windows in order to flip through from one mail to another. You can flag, star or tag them to your heart’s content but at the end there is always something that will be left unattended.
Today there are applications that practically tell you what’s important and what is not, based on your own input and your colleagues’ activities.
You can see what project is at what point, you can measure their profitability project by project, you can set up workflows that help automating part of your job – the possibilities are endless.
Want to message more than one person and get them to answer asap, plus want all of them to see each other’s answers? Just watch the confusion all the cc’s and bcc’s create…
When you use a social collaboration tool, it’s just like a group chat – with the added benefit of being able to send, receive, organize, edit documents – and nothing gets lost.
You are kept waiting. I am kept waiting.
Let’s take from an office viewpoint: you’ll never know if they read your mail just don’t answer, if they have no answer, if they didn’t even read it etc.
When you’re using some intranet-like system with a nice dashboard, you immediately see what happened to your communication. The person you wrote to keeps getting notifications until they answer, but most of the time you get an instant answer, just like in a chat app.
From the customer’s viewpoint, it’s very annoying when they can only send emails – for the same reason. Unless your customer service team is really top notch and answers every email within an hour, it’s a lot better to let your customers talk to you where everybody is anyway: social media.
If you don’t want to take it so public, you can use live chats – and of course the good old telephone. Just don’t leave email as the only option, don’t forget: whatever is they want to talk to you about, they want it solved / answered now.
If you want to keep up, you have no choice but to change for the smarter solutions in handling daily and larger tasks at the office.
Speed of data and speed of communication makes your business powerful. Don’t get stuck in the last century’s technology.