If you were to ask most tech-savvy business professionals 10 years ago if email would still be one of the primary business communication solutions, they would have probably said they had their doubts. However, as the years have gone on, email has established that it has some serious staying power. What we can expect to see going forward is not the demise of email altogether, but rather a shift of exactly how it gets used within business today.
So what will email look like in the future of business? Probably a little bit like this:
As Enterprise Social Networks and project management tools like Basecamp or TeamworkPM encourage team collaboration, documents and messages, email will serve as the tool that notifies the group participants about updates to a project or discussion. Rather than writing a letter responding to a huge thread of emails that simply hook onto the next message, the project management tool provides a more visual and cohesive way to communicate. However, to quickly respond to group discussions and projects, email notifications of the updates serve as a powerful resource.
Meetings, appointments and calendar requests. I bet most of us still receive and manage those through our email. For now, that doesn’t appear to be changing, it is overwhelmingly the preferred way for business professionals to schedule and monitor their time.
Today everything is about collaboration with others in order to deliver the best results possible. Two (or three, or four) heads are better than one, right? With this popular group mentality becoming the standard for many businesses, the tools used often take out the one-on-one discussions that may be required for more private or sensitive information. Email will likely serve as the textual tool still remaining that will provide the ability to connect more exclusively.
In today’s mobile world, it’s not as easy to miss a phone call and wait until the next morning to return it. Most businesses professionals today have simply come to expect a faster response time. Because of this, many office phone systems are offering ways to transfer your voicemail messages into emails.
Business communication solutions have shifted due to the many features and real-time options available today, but email continues to find itself as a vital component to various communication processes. As the most widely-used enterprise application, email will likely remain an integral component of business communication for many years to come.