Email has become the lingua franca of business. The fax is forgotten, the phone overtaken by the killer app of the internet. How many phone calls end with the words, “Can you just pop that into an email”?
But email’s popularity has created a massive headache for businesses. Daily avalanches of new mail must be one of the defining stresses of the modern world. Complaints such as “I went away for two days and came back to 73 emails!” are almost as common as moaning about the weather.
Although the ailment is near universal, email overload has real consequences. It means a business is more likely to miss the emails that matter. Such as inquiries from new customers, requests from existing customers, approaches by potential business partners.
If every employee in your company missed one email a week – and that email could have led to a $100 or $1,000 sale – over time that’s a lot of lost business. In short, an untamed inbox can cost a lot of money in missed opportunities. So how to fix your email? First you have to diagnose the problem.
We love email for several reasons but there are two that stand out.
It’s a funnel for all our business conversations. We can even get others to produce a written record of a phone call that is stored in our inbox and can be recalled with a quick search.
And emails often are associated with requests – from your boss or a customer or a colleague – so an inbox becomes a de facto list of to-do’s or reminders.
This leads to strong, subconscious attachments to the inbox because the information it holds is so incredibly valuable. Every contract signed and emailed to your business is in there. The list of prospective customers you need to meet is in there. If somehow your inbox was deleted, you’d be in serious trouble.
The issue is that email wasn’t designed for either of those tasks. It has moved to fill a gap in people’s lives but it is far from the perfect solution.
Take email as a record keeping tool. It’s fine for finding the contract your customer sent through last week. But how easy would it be to find the same contract a year later, after the same customer has signed 10 more contracts for various jobs? Searching through strings of email threads to find the right document is a great way to waste time – and runs the risk of recovering the wrong contract.
But the bigger issue is using an inbox as a to-do list. Email is by default stored by one context – time. The latest request is the first thing you see at the top of your inbox. The most important – an urgent request for tender – might be 10 emails down.
Starring and flagging emails works to a point, but it’s very hard not to succumb to the Pavlovian urge of reading and responding to the bold subject line that appeared 10 seconds ago. Or the immediate response from that funny colleague.
Now we know why our inbox is so important, and why it is so dysfunctional, we can start to do something about it. Like what?
Like separating your communications channels so that you’re not overwhelmed.
Businesses who have developed strategies for dealing with email use help desk software for existing customers, sales and marketing software for prospects, instant chat channels for colleagues.
In the next couple of posts (every Monday) we’ll take a look at examples of companies that successfully manage their digital communications and some of the theories behind email productivity.
This post is part of the Master your Email stream in the Future of Work series sponsored by Salesforce.com.