"The 475 respondents told us that although e-mail is very important to business, it is not a very satisfying experience," said Peter Brockmann, President of Brockmann & Company and author of the report.
Users rated e-mail 50 percent more important than mobile voice, 2 times more important than desktop voice and 10 times more important than fax-mail. Sixty eight percent of all e-mails originate outside the firm, and are often part of a commercial correspondence integrated with sales and service processes. Brockmann said, "Of the most frequent improvements requested -- mobile e-mail and better spam control -- only better spam control improves both mobile and desktop e-mail experiences."
Despite the best efforts of the software industry, the report shows that business people still get an average of 11.2 spam messages in their inboxes every day. Brockmann said, "The cure is often worse than the disease: 36 percent of respondents reported that their company had lost business as a result of an e-mail not getting through."
Users don't need more 'false-positives' either -- the treatment of perfectly good e-mail as spam - because it leads to lost business, frequent resend requests and delays in the business processes that depend on e-mail.
The report introduces the Spam Index, a simple method to measure an organizations' anti-spam performance allowing easy comparison to peers and competitors over time. "Making spam fighting an IT priority helps with employee productivity but our research shows that it also improves important business metrics like customer satisfaction and revenue. Four times more Top Performers have very satisfied customers and revenue per employee over $500,000 than Poor Performers."
