DaveBirchall.com on Business Technology

Electronic Mail or email as it has more commonly become known dates back several decades, as early at the 1970′s. With the widespread adoption of the internet, webmail, exchange technologies, email adoption expanded massively in the last decade in particular.

The latest development to aid in emails success is the proliferation of smart phones and Blackberry’s. Now emails can be sent anytime and anywhere. Email is decades old but more popular than ever- but what is the business case for email? Does email actually create more problems than it solves?

Whilst email has an important role in fast and effective communication, it can sometimes be counter-productive when you put the technology under the spotlight.

One of the drawbacks of email is also its strength – The convenience with which an email can be sent or received makes email addictive. In the 21st century there is an expectation that you should receive a timely response from the recipient which in turn leads to users frequent checking of their inbox. This is not only a time waster but also disrupts thoughts patterns which further hinders productivity.

Further to this, email has some more important drawbacks. Email users, in the course of ‘getting things done’ go about there business in highly erratic ways. From one user to the other, from one job to the next, work is completed in a very inconsistent manner. This means that efficiencies gained from the division of labour and process analysis are not available and all too often we find than menial tasks are completed by overqualified and expensive resources.

Important information captured along the way has a tendancy to remain on the email rather than being stored in a centralised location for easy access by other colleagues at a later date. Down the track, a customer is then asked the same questions over and over again which in turn can lead to customer dissatisfaction and perhaps eventually the loss of a customer.

Lastly, email systems have no way to measure the performance of the operators. Simple metrics to enable your business are not available when work is allocated over email. Examples of such metrics could be average order time, workload balancing, and the number of stuck orders.

Are there solutions to these problems?

A Business Process Management (BPM) or Workflow solution can counter these problems by enforcing and measuring processes, based on the roles and skills of the users. Information captured in these systems can be stored for reuse and easy access by work colleagues at a later date. The information can also be integrated with other systems such as an ERP or accounting package. These solutions promote a better understanding of the processes, which in turn promotes consistency and the ability to automate processes.

These technologies are no doubt better designed for the allocation of work than the decades old email platform, so why is email still so widely used? As we have already mentioned email can be addictive which means that the habit can be hard to break, but there is another important reason to explore.Previously, these systems have attracted lengthly development cycles and a large pricetag. People have the perception that customised workflow system are too expensive or difficult to set up, but is this really the case?

Advances in technology means that workflow systems can now implemented quickly and cost effectively. Solutions can be implemented in days or weeks rather than months or years. The payback is often staggering with massive jumps in customer service satisfaction, efficiency and cost savings.

Practical steps to get email undercontrol

1) Explain the role of email to your staff, when to use it and when to avoid it.
2) Encourage set times to check inboxes
3) Set more realistic expectations with your colleagues and customers; use autoresponders to let people know when you will check the inbox and what to do if its urgent
4) Implement a cost effective workflow solution and promote a culture of efficency and process centric thinking.

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