What do your communications cost?
Original article date: July 1997
Have you ever asked yourself what your communications cost? You could say for a letter, it’s 2p for the headed paper + 1p laser + 3p envelope + 26p stamp + writing time; for a fax it’s 5p for a phone unit per page + writing time; for an email it’s free + writing time; and to telephone it’s 5p (but how many calls are ever that quick?). But no-one really acceses email for free, and the writing time is probably far more important as a cost. Where email really scores is that people write it quicker, because it’s usually less formal.
But which is most certain to arrive?
Well, you can’t beat talking to the actual person. And if I was ordering from RS, I could probably read the order out over the phone as I typed a fax, then just keep the file I’d typed as a record. It’d be barely any more expensive in terms of time than sending the fax to them. I’d know there and then if the goods were in stock and that the order had arrived. But that’s a level of certainty above normal communications, a certainty that the actual intent has succeeded whereas most of the time just being sure that the message has got through is quite a feat.
With email, you can get a receipt, but it’s down to the software at their end what exactly that means. It could mean ‘the message has been viewed’, or it could mean ‘the message has made it to their mailbox’ or it could mean ‘they have downloaded it to their PC’.
With most fax machines you get a kind of confirmation. Would it ever count as proof later, if it came down to it?
With post you wait two days before you even find out, so that’s a bit uncertain.
Which is best for record purposes?
Faxes and letters tend to be recorded in some sort of company system, phone calls are frequently not recorded, and email is quite often total anarchy. Often the email package is a separate beast from the word processor used for every other document produced and this makes it more awkward to properly archive emails in the standard way. Ask someone about a fax they sent you a year ago, they might find it. Ask the same about an email, and you may not be in luck.
Most professional? Well, how many of us would really try and cold call a big client with an email? (Incidentally, all you pyramid selling swine out there, STOP SENDING ME THOSE JUNK EMAILS!!!!).
But the bigger question that lurks is ‘which is most effective?’. This is a sticky one. Apart from the fact that some people (yes you, Paul) check their email about once a day if we’re lucky, there is an entirely separate issue of how completely a communication succeeds in completing the task it was mean to. And the easier it is to use, the worse a medium is for that.
For example, somebody asks me how to do something and all I have is a postal address, I will tend to try and get it all answered in my letter. Someone asks me by email a question and we both have live connected accounts, there’s a good chance that I will dash back an email with a question about some point I want to clarify first. But so I can get the immediate message dealt with, I respond in a way that actually prolongs the whole exchange. This happens a lot with internal large company email things bounce backwards and forwards almost as informally as a badly run meeting, and it is often this that leads people to say “I spend the first hour reading my email”.
So I guess my Summer Resolution now is to try and end every communication exchange in one high quality message immediately, and whenever I ask some questions, to make it as easy as possible for the guy/gal the other end to do likewise. My “reclaim the bandwidth” campaign starts here!
July 1997