Why Social Messaging is better than Email
“Email is where knowledge goes to die”. This quote from Bill French is still one of my favourites and its sentiment is shared by many of us working on Zurmo. Need convincing? Allow me to state my argument:
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Got a question?
You email it to a list of people who potentially know the answer. If and when you get a response you are the only one who benefits from the answer. Its quite likely that the person responding has to answer the same questions quite frequently. If you ask the Community as a whole however then everyone can benefit from the answer and the responder only need answer it once.
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Faster answers
When I ask a question via email I send it to people I hope know the answer, if they cannot help they might loop in others who can. That’s great but it takes time, surely it would be better to put up your question to the whole community and let the person best placed to help give their response?
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Diverging Email Threads.
An email is sent to a group of people, someone responds to everyone and then someone else responds to everyone from the original email. All of a sudden you have 2 separate email threads to follow and have the confusion of which you need to reply to or not, etc.
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Managing your inbox
This itself can be a pain, tidying up new emails, dealing with people who use multiple email addresses, even being sure of who the email has come from?
Believe me, the list could go on. Despite its failings email continues to be the driving force in communication within companies and with their customers. The good news is that alternatives already exist.
Alternatives to email have been around for years in the shape of Forums and Blogs. More recently micro blogging has brought the benefit of these tools to the masses with Facebook, Twitter and endless other social websites.
Now we arrange our social lives and share ideas about all manner of things using social media because these tools make it fun and easy to do! When this trend began to unfold people realised this would be great for business too, and that has been the case!
It is strange then that most company’s internal communication continues to rely so heavily on email. Email is our old friend….. reliable and indispensable, but also un-sharing, unorganised, inefficient and often confusing. Thank God for email clients like Outlook that help us make sense of it all. We think it’s time our old buddy had some competition.
Zurmo’s social CRM messaging engine expects to steer internal business communication away from the ambiguity of email to an open, social and ultimately easier centralised platform. Our goal is to make it easy for people to collaborate on everything from new ideas to problems and free that knowledge from the shackles of the inbox!
Need more convincing? Look out for my upcoming posts where I talk more about the benefits of social messaging and how Zurmo will use Conversations, Missions and of course Gamification to free our knowledge.
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