Social media has serious ground to make up as statistics reveal email is still the favoured tool for office communication, a recent survey of email management company Mimecast reveals.
Email, rather than social networks, is preferred for exchange by 91 percent, meeting arrangements by 89 percent, information requesting by 88 percent and sharing views and opinions by 72 percent of users.
The average worker spends around four hours a day on email, according to Mimecast’s Shape of Email series. An average of 32 emails with a data total of 4.5MB passes through each person’s inbox per day.
Despite the large numbers of email use, only one out of every four users are completely happy with the type of service they are provided. The expectations are low as only one in every three people expect email to alter significantly by 2017.
“We are seeing information workers increasingly becoming inbox workers. They rely on email for all aspects of their job and spend, on average, 50 percent of their working day using email,” said Peter Bauer, Chief Executive and co-founder of Mimecast.
Social media figures of South African users show 6 million on Facebook (October) and 2.4 million on Twitter, double the amount of 12 months ago.
Despite the social media boom during the last decade and the wide variety of scam mails doing the rounds, almost three out of every four people deem information on emails more reliable than that of social networks.
Though 86 percent of business emailers prefer the inbox as a domain for retrieving documents, almost half think email slows down productivity.
“The research shows that the way the average employee uses email at work has changed. For many people, email is no longer just a messaging system. It has become the primary tool for storing, sharing and searching for information,” Bauer said.
The survey also revealed 10 percent of readers view other people’s emails. 35 percent of people like being copied into emails, even if it is not directly addressed or meant for their personal attention.
Mimecast is based in the USA, UK and South Africa. The company provides corporate email solutions via cloud computing to businesses.
