Email is dead, long live email.

The headlines have flown in the last year as to whether our forty year love affair with email is coming to an end. Driving the calls for the end to email were those citing the cost to our lives and productivity. French company ATOS famously announced its plans to ban internal emails by 2014 and German company Volkswagen stopped the delivery of work emails after hours.

But the 29 billion (and increasing) number of real emails sent every day are not going away in a hurry. More than anything businesses today are looking at how policy and technology changes can ensure their businesses are not the ones affected by the $900,000,000 productivity losses the American economy deals with each year.  

Recent research by the Grossman Group has found most believe that banning email in the workplace is the wrong approach to combating email overload, but what would you say if you CEO proposed banning email? This is an area in which many have weighed in with their opinions (interesting polarising views by David Grossman and Daniel Mittleman here), but when legislation is starting to be passed and unions start demanding change, then it is clear a solution is needed.

Policy changes and etiquette for businesses include encouraging workers to pick up the phone, walk across the office or switching to instant messaging to speak to colleagues. But what can be overlooked in these discussions is that email is no longer the only form of communication businesses and their customers are using. Many customers are now more comfortable Tweeting their relative un/happiness with your services. For companies still trying to keep on top of the email torrent, these can seem a next to impossible communication stream to keep on top of.

One of the driving factors behind the development of Unified Inbox was to bring all these communication streams together. There is no ability to intelligently manage their processing without realising the full scale of the communication overload that faces us. This step is one which most providers of communication software are missing, ensuring the business are stuck using the same message silos, as they have in previous years.

Take a look at the infographic below to see what damage overload is doing and how much a solution - a Unified solution - could save you.

Created by: OnlineITDegree.net