Paradigm shift

This article in my email from CyberAtlas leads off: "Professionals Prefer Typing To Talking". They didn't post this to their website yet and the source requires registration. The article tells it all, though. Think about what this means to your business (to me it affects how I will evaluate CRM software).

Hang up the phone and stop scheduling meetings — 80 percent of businesspeople prefer e-mail communication, according to a survey by META Group, Inc.

"These findings reveal a major tipping point in the evolution of communications," said Matt Cain, META Group senior vice president and an expert on e-mail and collaboration strategies. "While we had suspected that e-mail was becoming more popular than the phone, we were surprised by the magnitude of the ratio of those choosing e-mail over the phone. Clearly, e-mail best suits a changing business climate characterized by geographically distributed workgroups, extreme mobility, the need for rapid information dissemination, and a desire for reusable business records."

Conducted online among 387 organizations, the survey also found that nearly three-quarters (74 percent) of respondents believe being without e-mail would present more of a hardship than being without phone service.

Reasons For Preferring E-mail Over Phone for Business:
Response flexibility 84%
Can communicate with multiple parties easily 83%
Paper trail is created 78%
Can communicate more quickly 40%
More productive 29%
Easier for global communications 25%
Proper context 24%
More targeted, less socializing 22%