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How to Speed up Your Business Communication

3 min read
Nov 27, 2014
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How to speed up your business communication

If there is one universal mistake nearly all companies make, it would be writing too many emails.

We were also guilty of this. We had too many ongoing email conversations to keep up. All meaningful discussions were quickly getting buried under a pile of unread emails. Our business communication was stuck.

Since we couldn't get rid of it all, we needed an alternative. Something faster and simpler – an instant messenger.

Growing business communication needs

When collaborating on several different projects with different groups of people, the business communication can get pretty hectic, pretty fast.

You need to keep up with several email conversations, read through all of them whenever there's an update. Before you notice, you spend half of your time on writing and reading email. This kills any kind of progress.

We missed the good old days when we could design, prepare and publish our ideas within days instead of weeks. To get them back, we slashed the number of emails we were sending by pushing a large portion of the conversation to Slack – a business communication app.

Instant messenger seemed like a natural pick. We are well aware of the speed it offers. It allowed us to handle a lot of our business communication instantly, without having to wait for a response. Now, we use email for longer, more important cases and Slack for quick discussions.

The effect? We are able to work faster and we now spend less time in the inbox.

Why not LiveChat?

Now, you might think to yourself: “Why wouldn’t they use their own software? It is chat and they would get it for free.” Yes, and yes, but would it be what we are really looking for?

We think that the way you talk with your customers is much different to the way you talk with your team. These two forms of business communication require different tools.

LiveChat has been designed to provide the fastest way to connect customers with businesses. To adapt it to agent-to-agent communication, we would need to sacrifice some of that experience. We don't want that.

All the time that would have to be put into preparing agent-to-agent conversations is better spent on developing the existing application.

What should be your main takeaways from this?

Spend less time in your inbox. Use other tools like instant messengers to collaborate and exchange information. Step out of the office from time to time and simply talk with the person who can help you with something.

It's also important that you don't bring your old emailing habits into the IM too. You don't need to read and respond to the messages all the time. Self-discipline can be as important as picking the right tools.

If you really need to use email, do it smart. Check out these 6 tips for clear email communication that will help you write more informative and precise emails.

Photo courtesy of Judith E. Bell via Creative Commons.

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