Can You Improve Your Business by Eliminating Email One Day a Week?
Posted by Wendy Gorrie on Thu, Aug 20, 2009 @ 12:36 PM
In the past several months, Plus has instituted "No email Wednesday" including internal and external customers and vendors, after our first no email day, I am happy to report I have learned a lot.
1. Confirmed that we do not talk by voice to our customers enough (I knew this), our team received good visibility into this issue when they started to dig into some opportunities we had with clients and discovered that in some cases the only voice communication we had with them was voice mail. In fact the customer did not know what we expected them to do with the email and had delayed responding because they didn't know how to communicate their confusion by email. They want to "hear" from us.
2. Good examples of resistance disguised as agreement, "I agree, but what if this, what if that" etc. internally. Furthering my belief that we have to concentrate on being more connected to our partners, there is too much reliance on emails. I submit to all who will listen that the client will be more than ok with hearing that we have a document to provide them and will send it to them the next business day. In very few cases do our communications demand instant response.
3. All it takes is a phone call in order to get through the issues sometimes, people confirmed that they received emails but hadn't "got to it yet" because the email fell off the screen in the email inbox.
4. Email has become a substitute for planning your day, people who rely on email are thrown off totally when they have to make a plan for dealing with to do issues instead of dealing with each new issue as it came up. Taking care of the important things vs what crops up. I for one am guilty of this.
Of course all of this is no big surprise, what would happen if we actually TALKED with our partners, vendors and customers - what a crazy idea.
I hope it doesn't sound too bad, after all, I believe that we offer excellent customer service, and to continue to do so, we need to constantly reinforce the customer focus.
I believe it did open the eyes of all of us at Plus, we can't say we offer good customer service if we don't actually offer good customer service - the customer decides what is good customer service. Yes, it may be more efficient to send an email, but is it effective, is it what the customer wants?
I challenge everyone to commit to back away from the keyboard and pick up the phone one day a week I believe it will improve your communications everyday, not just on "No email day", you can do it!