I love communicating but hate email
We have spent 40 years making communication more efficient but not necessarily more effective.
Email arrived in 1991 and it promised to revolutionise communication. No more waiting for the post, less expensive international calls, no postage costs, messages could arrive instantly and copied far and wide to all that had a remote interest.
It was a remarkable leap forward.
Forty years later, I’m no longer convinced it has made us better communicators and in many cases I think it has done the absolute opposite. Endless cc chains, passive aggressive communication, spam, sales pitch after sales pitch, an assumption that someone else’s problem can be solved by firing up another email and then there is the cynicism and misunderstanding which is off the scale and is just miserable. Our inboxes are a toxic health hazard.
The death of conversation
Think about how many situations could be resolved in five minutes over a coffee or a phone call to clear the air, get clarity or discuss the matter in question. Instead less and less gets resolved quickly and we have somehow created a world where people will spend three days emailing about the most trivial things rather than picking up the phone.
The irony is that the very technology designed to save time has ended up wasting it.
Efficiency isn’t the same as email effectiveness
We need to stop treating efficiency as the aim and look at effectiveness in that it has only worked if it has improved the result or got us to the outcome we needed.
The KPI shouldn’t be – How quickly can we send the message it should be, did we achieve what we were trying to achieve?
Business is a human process
Many organisations have become obsessed with automating communication whether it be emails, linkedin messages, follow up but they are missing the connection and usually the right person!
One of the great added benefits of social media when it arrived 20 years ago allowed us to be accesible to our market. We could respond to criticism praise or otherwise engage with prospects and customers who in turn felt like they were dealing with humans rather than a faceless corporation. Well thats gone pear shaped and full circle in a very short space of time as now we dont know what is real and we definately dont feel we are in contact with a person.
For small – medium businesses our human accessibility is still one of our USPs – to be able to respond and speak to prospect is pure gold in an Ai heavy world, to be able to gather evidence rather than work on assumption is a superpower. Use it before you just get lost in the great noise.
The reality is that important buying decisions are rarely made because somebody received their eighth perfectly timed email sequence. People buy when they understand the problem, trust the person and feel heard, feel safe making the decision, believe the outcome is worth the risk (this is their reputation at stake) – all these things are still largely human.
As for hiding behind email
Email is wonderful for confirming, documenting, sharing information and confirming arrangments. It is poor at conversations which allows questions, challenge discovery and understanding in fact it creates huge inefficiencies here.
My key point about email
Use technology, Ai, email and any tool to become more efficient. But where the outcome depends on people understanding people, don’t automate away the human bit.
Because after forty years of email, one thing still seems true. The best communication usually happens when two human beings have a conversation.
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