Do you remember when email was new? I was seven years old when I signed up for my first email address. Back then, dial up internet on pay-as-you-go was still the normal. I was so excited waiting 30 minutes for my mum to get off the phone so that I could read the email my aunty sent, or a friend at school. It was like getting mail but a lot cooler, and when I was seven years old I was very excited whenever I received mail in the post...
Now I'm an adult, I have very quickly realised; mail in the post is usually one of two things 1) an advert or 2) another bill to pay... yay...
Now with my iPhone, I carry my email in my pocket, which is great! Except that, most of my emails are now, well, either a bill or an advert - and a lot of websites request an email address in return for a service. You can't buy something from Amazon without having to sign up. Not surprisingly, I get regular emails from them advertising products every week. You may be able unsubscribe from the mailing lists, but most people find themselves fighting a losing battle to do this for every website they want to purchase something from.
Interestingly, the use of email as a form of communication between family and friends has declined massively since its heyday a few years ago. Even landline phones seem almost outdated now, everyone uses mobiles and the only people who call me on a landline are telesales…
These days, people use services like Skype and Facebook to keep in touch. They still advertise to us, but it appears in a less intrusive manner. I remember over a year ago I read an article about a technology company that was getting rid of internal email, with the company claiming that only 15% of internal email was useful. This just highlights the fact that we are already seeing a transformation from email towards social networking and instant messaging in the business world as well as in our private lives.
Yet in order to try and contact a debtor, we still focus on phones, addresses and emails...
This has left me thinking - what if we were to target Skype and Facebook instead? Communicating with debtors on a wider variety of channels can only be an improvement - right? But if we do that then how long will it be until people in general stop using Facebook because it’s just a bunch of adverts and bills? And how can we even predict which social networking sites will last? Everyone thought MySpace was going to last forever until Facebook came along…..
I honestly don’t know what the answer is, but as the modern world of communication is so fickle and rapidly changing – surely we should, as an industry, start preparing for the next forms of communication? Or will we just end up following debtors on short-lived sites like MySpace? The phrase “adapt or die” seems ever more relevant these days! Here at TDX we are recognising the ever-changing power of the internet through developing e-collections tools which are some of the first on the market to make the most of our varied electronic communications methods - but are we prepared to keep ahead of the game, and can we even predict what the game may develop into? This is the modern challenge we all face in business and one nobody yet has the answer to.
Luke Simmons, Tester, TDX Group
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