SAN JOSE, Calif. and BANGALORE, India, Sept. 17, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Hiver, a leading email collaboration solution for teams, released its first annual ‘State of Email’ report. With the growth of Slack and its recent IPO, many “experts” have predicted a steady decline and eventual death of email as an effective business communications tool. Based on the report, its death has been largely exaggerated, as email usage continues to grow. However, there are a number of problems with it, demonstrating that in two decades since email became the standard for business communication, it is showing its age and requires significant changes to maintain its dominant position in the market.
According to the new data in the State of Email report, inbox clutter for the average professional is increasing. The daily company email influx went up by 13% over a one-year period (see methodology below). In 2017, employees read 75% of the emails they received, but one year later that number was down to 60%, suggesting that people are becoming more discerning about the emails they read. Of the 60% of emails that employees do read, they only reply to one out of every 10 messages.
The Use of CC and Forward Email Functions Increased, yet Open and Response Rates Went Down
The email practice of copying or cc’ing has become standard in virtually every message, for reasons ranging from keeping people updated on specific projects, to accounting for their work with their managers to establish a paper trail should there be future confusion or disagreements.
This practice is increasing the amount of overall email traffic by 10%, according to the State of Email Report. When people are cc’d on emails, they reply only to one of every four messages, which dropped by 25% in 12 months. In addition, the emails that were opened decreased by 10%, suggesting that the average employee is cc’d on many emails that have little relevance to their job or assignments.
Forwarding is also a common email practice. Employees often use the forward function as a way to share information as well as delegate tasks to team members, and provide a trail of evidence that a task was received and assigned. According to the report, 13% of the total emails that employees receive are forwarded to them. Between 2017 and 2018, the number of forwarded emails that people read went down by 11%, and employees only responded to one in five of these emails, down by a staggering 31%.
“Email clearly remains an essential and popular way of communicating, but there are a number of findings from the Hiver State of Email Report that indicate that it is broken and requires a significant rehaul,” said Niraj Rout, co-founder and CEO of Hiver.
“There is a disconnect in which people are sending more emails, yet opening and responding to fewer of them. The low response and read rates for cc and forwarded emails demonstrate that while people want to use email as a collaboration tool, it was clearly not designed for it.”
Hiver Helps Teams Better Collaborate Over Gmail
Hiver’s mission is to give the more than four million businesses that use G Suite and Gmail unmatched capabilities that transform email into a collaborative, accountable and productive communications solution. With Hiver’s platform, organizations of any size can use shared inboxes to assign each email as a task and to an owner, with current status, leading to greater transparency, accountability and productivity. Thousands of companies around the world are already using Hiver to make email a more productive, streamlined and empowering experience.
Based on continuous technology innovation, ongoing customer feedback and the findings of the State of Email Report, Hiver is introducing today new capabilities that further address the limitations of email solutions. New enhancements include:
- Search Within Notes: Notes allow users to notify teammates using @mentions, which eliminate the need for BCCs, CCs, and forwarding in the inbox. Users can search within the Notes function to easily find crucial updates.
- Views: With the Views feature, users can add various filters to their Gmail inbox to reduce information overload and organize the emails based on team and role. This makes the communication experience more personalized.
- Customer Satisfaction Survey: This new enhancement enables Hiver users in departments such as support and account management to solicit customer feedback about their overall experience with that company directly within email. This helps organization’s track their team’s performance, measure their growth and identify opportunities for improvement.
For a copy of the full State of Email report, please go to the Hiver website here.
About Hiver
Hiver transforms Gmail into a collaboration platform by enabling teams to easily manage shared email accounts, like support@. Based out of Bangalore and San Jose, Hiver has over 1,500 customers across 30 countries, including Hubspot, Harvard University, Vacasa and Shutterstock. To learn more, visit https://hiverhq.com/.
Methodology:
Data collected for this report was processed from over 300,000 email threads and 4.7 million emails of organizations that use Hiver as a collaboration platform. This data was observed over two time periods: November 1-November 7, 2017 and November 1-November 30, 2018.
Media Contact
Merrill Freund
hiver@bocacommunications.com