People complaining about email is about as common as gripes with the weather and bad customer service. In short, it’s an ongoing issue that consumes vast amounts of peoples’ work and social time every day of the week. But while it may seem a trivial complaint, the true cost of poor email management is having a huge impact on businesses of all sizes.
The average worker spends five hours per day checking emails, according to Adobe’s email usage study, while only 46% of the respondents stated that they were able to clear their email inboxes. That’s as a result of around 269 billion emails being sent and received every day, a figure that is expected to grow to 320 billion daily emails, according to Statista insights. Furthermore, in 2017 alone people sent and received more than 120 billion work emails, according to Radicati data.
This email overload has a major impact on employees’ wider productivity levels. Every time an employee stops what they were doing to open up the new email that a pop-up notification has advised them of they inevitably lose focus on the previous task. In fact, further research shows that the average person needs 23 minutes to get back on track. Therefore, if this happens just five times during a day then that worker will have wasted nearly 2 hours of valuable time.
These numbers alone refute the age-old claim that “email is dead.” Despite the hype around various new collaboration and messaging tools, email remains by far and away the most widely used communication tool. However, there is a way for businesses to reduce the time spent on email, take control of the communication overload, help teams work more efficiently, and to use email as a tactical advantage.
Using email to your advantage
This email overload may sound trivial. However, at Mail Manager, we devised an ROI based on the amount of time and money our Outlook add-in solution saves businesses. The solution saves three hours per week for the average employee, who costs their business £15 per hour. That equates to a cost-saving of £180 per user per month. For an organisation with 100 users, that means a saving of £18,000 in billable hours.
To reduce this huge cost of ineffective email management, businesses need tools that save them the time-intensive task of searching for specific emails and project information. They need to deploy software that guarantees all information that is shared by email is stored in the correct folder or location on their server, and that it is accessible and discoverable by every member of the project team.
Businesses also need to ensure that even legacy information from completed projects and emails sent or received by staff that are no longer with the company are discoverable. This is vital in the case of litigation purposes and for protecting themselves in legal disputes.
Eradicating email pain
Businesses don't need to 'accept' a chaotic inbox anymore. Mail Manager enables businesses to discover emails and project correspondence within seconds. It eradicates painful searches for specific emails or documents, prevents important project details from being locked away in individual inboxes, and makes information instantly accessible by every member of a team.
The solution uses an AI engine that predicts where every email should be filed and ensures all communication is stored in the most appropriate folder. This removes reliance on staff filing their own emails and prevents the possibility of critical information from being deleted. It also enables businesses to ensure that all employees file information in the same way, which helps them to adhere to increasingly stringent data regulations and ISO standards.
Make your email management efficient
There’s no denying that email is here to stay. However, the numbers above also prove that employees and businesses alike don’t use the tool efficiently or effectively. People complain about email because it takes up huge amounts of their time and their inboxes quickly get clogged up. This sheer mass of email also makes it difficult to find the information that people need, when they need it, which can have a major impact on project delivery and with issues like legal disputes.
It’s time to stop people complaining about their email by making it easier for them to manage their inboxes and, where appropriate, taking the process out of their hands.
To find out more about the ROI of better email management, download our guide here.
