Member Article

Can businesses rekindle their love affair with email?

Email was once seen, and to an extent maybe still is, as one of the best business tools ever invented.

The ability to send a personal message to someone anywhere in the world at the click of a button, and attach business documents or other items, was a ‘game changer’ for business communication, drastically reducing the time it took to send and receive information, and allowing document or contract signings to be completed from different parts of the world within minutes.

However, like everything else, too much of a good thing inevitably becomes a burden and as digital communication – especially mobile communications in the form of smartphones and tablets – has become the norm, the sheer number of emails people now have to deal with has become overwhelming.

From a business management stand point, dealing with the number of customer requests, interoffice communication, staff newsletters, prospect emails and any other number of spam content that piles up in an inbox on a daily basis is unmanageable, and it is easy for important correspondence or documents to get lost.

That’s not even taking into account the number of emails people are copied into involving other people, or others they are added to as an ‘FYI’.

A major issue with managing emails is that people often rely on their own ability to file emails themselves, both on the company network and in their own email accounts.

It is no surprise then that so many important emails get ‘lost in the inbox’ as people get swamped with work and forget to flag emails, or don’t check them regularly enough to spot them. Similarly, even those emails which are flagged as important can be easily forgotten about during the manual processing, archiving and filing of items.

Email archiving – the process of capturing email content either directly from the email application, or during transport to preserve emails and make them searchable – has often been hailed as the solution to this problem but, while it might solve some issues, it is not the complete cure.

Truth be told, there is no widespread solution to dealing with masses of emails, but taking a different approach to email management and realising you will have to compromise in some areas can allow your business to make some positive improvements.

Reducing some manual filing processes, by integrating critical email into a document management system can help to ensure that business commitments made via email are automatically stored correctly and safely, so they can be easily found if needed at a later date.

Another major problem with emails is the ‘point-to-point’ nature of the communications, and the stages at which new people are brought into conversations means they may not know the full details of the conversation to that point.

Agreeing something with a simple response still amounts to an agreement, but if the rest of the business team or departments are not aware of the conversation’s history they may not understand exactly what has been agreed to.

This lack of visibility or transparency is a long running and potentially serious problem for businesses. It has long been predicted that transactional communications in particular – like an accountant requesting approval for a tax return form – will not be made by email in the future, with some predictions going so far as to predict the death of emails entirely by the end of the decade.

Web based portals, which allow people to share documents and edit them over a shared platform have grown increasingly popular in recent years, and are cited to improve visibility and create a more coherent audit trail.

It will always be said that emails have drastically improved the way organisations communicate, but the popularity of emails since their inception have caused a new raft of challenges and complications to overcome.

Keeping on top of emails can be a challenge but, like introducing any new systems and processes into a business, by knowing where to look and focussing on identifying challenges, finding where to focus makes it possible to overcome these problems.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ian Smith .