Email has been the dominate medium of communication in the business world for the last 20 years. Employees get hundreds of emails a day and spend hours to do their email. Often they need to work through endless email threads and are part of communications which don’t really require their input or attention. However, a better future is ahead.
In the enterprise world we currently see the beginning of a transition away from email towards business messaging apps for the internal communication. First reasons for this can be found in the consumer world where this transition has already happened: Hardly anyone is writing emails anymore. People write text messages and use messaging apps for the communication with family and friends.
Why? The communication is faster, less formal, more direct and personal. All communication is delivered in real-time. People get instant feedback because the messages are received with push notifications. Users can easily send digital content like photos, videos, locations, etc. Messaging apps have user interfaces which require less clicks and scrolling on mobile devices. Besides messaging needs no unnecessary overhead like titles and formal salutation, which reduces the typing for users. All this makes messaging apps more efficient and productive than email.
Due to the private use, employees know the benefits of messaging apps, and understand the advantages in comparison to email. That’s why more and more employees use consumer messaging apps on their device (e.g. Whatsapp) to accelerate the internal business communication. They set up group chats for their teams and projects, quickly solve important business topics with colleagues, make decisions in real-time and easily share all kinds of digital content.
While initially first worried about the data protection, security and compliance of consumer services used by their employees, more and more businesses are beginning to understand the benefits of messaging apps. We can clearly observe this by the enquiries we increasingly get for Teamwire: Enterprises are understanding the potential productivity benefit of a business messaging app, and are actively searching for a secure enterprise messaging solution.
It is just a matter of time that business messaging apps will become the dominant medium for the internal communication. While email is likely to stay the most used channel for the official communication with customers and partners in the near future (e.g. like a letter), business messaging apps will be the standard channel for fast, easy and direct communication with colleagues and teams.