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Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Is Email an effective business tool?

This post is non-fashion related, however I do think so it is an important issue so I'll just go ahead with it.

Do you think that email is an effective business tool?
Personally, I do think so that email is the very most important business tool.
This is due to the course of my work, I rely heavily on email to convey my messages to my customers. Correspondence is critical and thus email, being immediate is the best tool at current. For example, I get to email quotations and proposals immediately and that will cut down my responds time to within a day. If lucky, I'd probably get my reply within the same day.

However, I do think so there are people out there who tend to disagree with my love for email as a business tool. What more a reliable one.
I can't deny that too. Having tones of spam everyday is such an annoyance. Sometimes they make you miss out your really important emails. Other times, email systems aren't very reliable, your email may not reach the intended recipient at all.And request receipt does not help all the time either.

What triggers me to write today's post is because recently, I find my emails getting less and less reliable. True and genuine emails are getting scarce, buried under multitude of spam.
Antispam solution is not 100%. If you want to rid of more spam, you may risk some of your important&genuine emails. If you set the sensitivity low, more spam will pass through.... Its all in the balance i guess and its up to the IT guy to decide.

We practice sending emails periodically to inform our clients on our project status. Sometimes some of the reports/emails needs interaction from the recipient in which we need their responds to the matter and subject raised. Normally we will specify that we need a responds from the customer to us in order to continue the next step. However I realized that most of our customers DO NOT RESPOND to email.

I'm getting really frustrated with this. I don't know what to think about email anymore. We've recently resorted to Fax instead of emailing. That's because Fax mostly will reach our intended recipient whilst email sometimes doesn't!! And.....Fax manage to invoke a responds as oppose to Email messages. (Not talking about return receipt ok.....I'm meaning actual responds)

The way things are going, I'm thinking that perhaps one day, email will no longer be essential and proper for business correspondence anymore and we will go back to the Faxing, Phone and maybe Skype...
Email? What email??? Such a nuisance.......Emails are for leisure....definately not for work anymore.......


What think you?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

So far, without a doubt, it is still the most effective business tool for me.

Sometimes, in my line of work, I don't get any replies via email but they would contact me by phone. However, the majority still replied via email. :)

I know of some companies who would send an email (with attachments even), followed by the hard copies via post as evidence. Naturally there's no cut-cost in such cases & so much for minimising the use of paper. :(

That's just my 2 cents worth.

Have a great day & the rest of the week! :p

Anonymous said...

IMHO, put it this way - emailing is a useful communication tool which can be utilized either for work or leisure.

It's cheap, fast, hassle free and there are many security options provided so why not?

Compare it to faxes - not entirely secure or confidential, may not be clear depending on the level of ink and type of paper used, may not get through and there's no confirmation to say that it got through.

Phones - unless you're using one of those big communicators, it can be hard to type long sms. also, it is rather expensive and unsafe (if your handphone gets stolen, you lose all your contacts.

at the end of the day, it takes 2 to tango like what you (and Jemima) have said - no point using it if the recipient doesn't. just send hard copies rather than waste time to both...

Ianfluenza said...

Email's still working fine for me in terms of spam. As fot the lack of response from receipients, that would be out of my control. The only thing I can do is to flood my business recipients' inbox with "We haven't received your reply yet. Hope to hear from you soon." Hahaha!

Anonymous said...

Hi, this is not regarding your post.

Firstly, I want to thank you for visiting my blog. :)
I only found out this morning when I noticed that your comment has been classified as spam. :(
Anyway, I've un-spammed you & I hope you will drop by again soon. :p

Take care.

PP said...

I think a lot has to do with the nature of work. In mine, we don't use it because everything must be backed up by hard copies. Defeats the purpose of email. Even when I email also I have to print it out. No saving of trees here :p

I prefer to keep email for fun. That way every time I get mail, I know its something I'll look forward to... unless its spam but thank god for gmail and the spam filter! :D