As providers of next-generation Intelligent Business Email, a discussion on Twitter about the future of email naturally caught our eye. The specific question posed in a tweet addressed the high school generations’ preference for texting and how this will impact on business communication:

“Email seems to be in trouble as a communication medium. High school students aren’t using it, they just text. As this generation grows up how would that impact business communication?”

Responses to the question came from a variety of users in the Twitter community. While not an empirical study, the responses to the question provide an intriguing insight into what is happening on the ground and where things are heading. It also got the Inbotiqa team thinking about the history and future of communication – more on that later.

While messenger / chat services and collaboration tools are popular, useful and valued, the overall consensus from the discussion was that they are used in conjunction with business email. On the take-up of email by younger generations, once students progress to university and then on into the workplace, email has been adopted. This doesn’t mean messaging or text are abandoned, they are used in tandem. As one VC responded:

“They adopt it in college and even more so when they join the work force. I’ve seen it again and again with my kids and their friends. I’ve heard people predict the death of email for twenty years and it just gets stronger and stronger.”

Text and messaging allow for speed but comments outlined issues with keeping track of who is doing and has done what. The need for better organisation and search capabilities as provided by email was also put forth. Other replies described companies using one or a combination of internal workflow or project management tools and team collaboration solutions – but still needing to revert to email for external communications with clients or in other instances.

Among these, a desire was expressed for a merger of such services – but with the issue of assimilating external emails into work channels still needing to be resolved. The important fact that email provides a formal verification of identity and record of what has occurred, in contrast to the informality of text and messaging, was also raised. The cumbersome nature of long email chains did not escape comment either.

One reply said there are companies that use collaboration tools alone, which seems to indicate that the nature and size of certain businesses and their operations are able to function without reverting to email. Considering the majority of responses to the tweet, and that over 124 billion business emails were sent each day in 2018, projected to rise to over 129 billion in 2019, the need for email as a business communication channel will endure.

Thinking back to the advent of the telephone, people likely considered that its growing prevalence hailed the end of letters, as the necessity of sending mailed correspondence to converse was removed. The telephone did reduce the need for physical mail, and lead to swifter conclusions by enabling conversations which are faster, but it did not provide a formal record of the discussion or a formal or legal agreement. The need to send mail was reduced by the telephone, but it became more of a final formal step as the need for a record, agreement or contract to be produced remained.

Over time, mail evolved into email as it kept up with phones and electronic communication networks. Fast-forward to the present day and a similar situation is occurring with chat / messenger services and project, collaboration and internal workflow tools. As with the telephone, they are increasing the speed of modern-day communication mediums. But they are also evolving ecomms yet further, creating a more asynchronous form of communication in keeping with today’s global and distributed world. Yet still, all this back and forth collaboration, discussion, design and negotiation needs to result in a common, formal accepted record and format, which today is email – especially in business.

This is the Inbotiqa approach. Just as mail evolved into email, present-day email needs to evolve to become intelligent, “i-mail”, in order to keep up and remain fit for purpose for the needs of the business community. Our Intelligent Business Email platform converges email and workflow. High-volume business email group mailboxes and distribution lists are replaced. Our YUDOmail platform sits on top of existing email systems, providing a workflow management and analytics tool that also cuts costs, reduces turnaround times and risks, increases productivity and improves customer service. Emails are transformed into actionable, trackable, traceable tasks that drive performance and service.

The addition of YUDOsmart to the Inbotiqa platform further enhances internal communication, management insights and productivity gains. With this evolution to Inbotiqa’s next-generation Intelligent Business Email and the additional benefits it brings, our conviction that business email will endure only increases, and in an enhanced form that further underpins a high-performance culture.

Looking into the future, we envisage the ongoing evolution of email. Ultimately, there is a need for an omnichannel business communications tool to be developed.

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The struggle to stay on top of the beast that is email can feel relentless. Perhaps it’s time to reinvent the strategy so we’re no longer fighting email, but taming it…

It’s hard to think of anyone in the back-office ecosystem who would not be familiar with the daily battle to keep a handle on out-of-control emails in inboxes and shared mailboxes. The constant struggle of ensuring emails are processed on time, preventing any being missed, managing folders efficiently, staying complaints amid myriad rules and regulations, and so on, saps resources and draws focuses away from tasks that truly add value.

As such, it’s rightly so that most back-office management and technology teams look to replace email. They generally do so by creating online portals to submit instructions, as opposed to emailing them. This is realised by building execution-management tools and user interfaces which are implemented using custom-built workflow systems or creating them in-house (an expensive option).

While all of these solutions work to a degree, they only resolve a slice of the issues around high-volume email traffic. They also tend to add a fair amount of additional manual work. All the while, our inboxes and shared mailboxes remain open on our desktops as they consistently contain work that is non-standard, of a high priority or introduces a new request or function that has not yet been prioritised.

What can often be forgotten are the intrinsic benefits of email. These are, after all, why billions of emails are sent each and every day, and why email remains such a popular form of business communication. Email is flexible in terms of what it can be used for, therefore ideal in complex business environments; it’s universally used – internally by businesses and externally between them and their customers; and it’s an official communication channel, used to convey information formally and on record with stakeholders. These are all great benefits.

The ideal solution, therefore, is to tame email by fixing the pain points, not fighting them. The main pain points being: how to track ownership; how to do this across entire organisations; and how to extract useful metrics and analytics out of this valuable data. Once this is possible, it enables the effective management of email-based processes through allocated task ownership. It also generates real-time data to identify slices of work within email and migrate them to specialist systems.

At iNBOTiQA, we created our YUDOmail solution with all this in mind. In a previous blog, our Director of Technology discusses in more detail the journey that has led us to the next step in taming the back-office email beast: YUDOsmart. With YUDOmail and YUDOsmart, we tame the beast that is email, then harness it to extract the latent power within, helping to cuts costs, boost productivity, reduce risk and improve customer service. It is possible to give up the fight and enjoy the benefits of tamed emails and inboxes.

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One of our Tier 1 banking clients just completed their Inbotiqa YUDOmail pilot. A fascinating insight was brought to light by a very specific metric: the chase rates of both internal and external counterparties (i.e. how many follow follow-ups or reminders were sent) and who they had to chase. The client shared with us a few recurring themes around this valuable discovery so we tested it with some of our other clients, including non-banking ones.  This revealed a number of recurring behaviour patterns across the board, all of which can be identified and resolved with the volumes metric from YUDOmail.

Here, we are pleased to share some lessons we gained from this revealing exercise.

Inbound chaser emails: Noise and recurring issues

We define an inbound chaser email as an inbound email following a previous inbound email on the same topic and from the same email address. We uncovered two key inbound-chaser themes.

Firstly, a significant number of inbound chaser emails are not only system generated, they are also sent within one hour of the original email. These are deemed as ‘noise’ chasers by Inbotiqa clients. With the volumes metric in YUDOmail, our clients can request the generators of these emails to switch them off or to increase the chasing interval to a reasonable time. This small change means that human resources are not distracted from solving the actual underlying issues by interim noise.

The second was the ability to identify the root causes of ‘true’ chasers. Our clients were able to identify recurring chasers from the same sources, which indicated a root issue on their side. With this information, they were able to eliminate root causes thereby removing the need for the initial query as well as the chasers.

Outbound chasing and repeat offenders

Outbound chasers are defined as “an outbound email following another outbound email on the same topic and to the same email address”. A major theme emerged from our data: most chasing was needed for repeat offenders. The YUDOmail metrics revealed two indicators: Firstly, often 80% of chasers where sent to only a handful of repeat offenders. Secondly, that multiple chasers were needed to an even smaller recurring group of repeat offenders.

Inbotiqa clients are therefore able to influence staff behaviour so that the number of chaser emails required to resolve an issue can be reduced, improving task turnaround time and operational efficiency. Another key benefit of YUDOmail’s data is that not only does it tell you who needs chasing – it also exposes the types of issues they are being chased about. This allows our clients to reach out to repeat offenders to resolve any specific recurring issues and eliminate those root causes.

Actionable analytics and metrics

The beauty is that these simple metrics, namely the volumes of inbound and outbound chasers, and who and which issues they involve, provide immediately actionable metrics. These can then be used to:

• Reduce email volumes which in turn frees up valuable human resources to do real work;
• Identify recurring issues within your organisation and fix root causes, thereby preventing issues arising in the first place; and
• Enable positive behaviour change among both internal and external stakeholders.

The bottom line is that fixing root causes and enabling behaviour change means fewer breaks, fewer emails and happier clients.

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