« Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity | Home | Cellular dreams and wireless parking. »
Email answering service
By susan | April 20, 2008
All it takes to see a new business opportunity is to spot a problem.
Another one arrived today courtesy of Randall Cross’s piece in the Times, Struggling to Evade the E-mail Tsunami. Before I explain, I’d like to pause for a second to respond to that title. Let’s put aside the issue of using the word “tsunami” to exaggerate, and focus on the word email. Or as the Times calls it, “e-mail.” Does that word really require a hyphen? I stopped using the hyphen years ago and I don’t know who else is using it besides The New York Times. But email is a perfectly good word all on its own, and given the context of Cross’ article and our information overload, should any of us be spending time with hyphens where they are not absolutely required?
Stratford-upon-Avon, the town with too many hyphens, gets a pass on this from me. I am much too fond of the town that is a glorified museum for all things Shakespeare to mess with their hyphens. But please. Should email get the same respect as Stratford-upon-Avon? Would Shakespeare himself have used a hyphen in the word email? And which of his characters would have received the most emails?
Better to focus on today’s characters who receive too many emails. And today’s report. Because yes, if Romeo and Juliet had been equipped with cell phones and SMS, they both may have lived happily ever after.
Mark Cuban and Michael Arrington receive over 1000 and 2000 emails per day respectively (non-spam) and neither wants a secretary. Of course not. Even though that’s the obvious 20th century solution to such a conundrum, these are 21st century guys. So are all the bloggers who receive hundreds of comments and emails each day. They don’t do secretaries. So to speak.
So what’s the solution? A new one, to make this market happy. Not an old one, revisited from the past. Something that sounds new, uses web 2.0 and open source, and — this is the most important part — makes them feel good about using it.
That’s right. It has to feel like something so cool and fascinating that they would be all over it, knocking on your door to hand over their emails. So your service could review, cull, deliver what they want; while taking care of the rest of what they don’t want and still keeping them honest.
It’s an open source world. Do we hear an open source solution coming?
Part of it would be automated, of course. For example, they don’t want another desk in their office next to them. And they definitely don’t want to pay benefits and healthcare. They want the personal touch addressed to emails. They know, better than anyone, how woefully inadequate automated content searches are in delivering the most basic human understanding of an emailed query. So for that part of it, human brain power would be required. It’s faster, more efficient, and can see things that no computer can.
I believe there’s a lucrative opening here for a range of providers. And we are not talking about a market of two. Okay, so out of the 70 million blogs tracked, only 15 million were active last year. But according to Arrington’s TechCrunch, the top fifty thousand blogs earned $500 million in revenue in 2006.
So it’s not that these 21st century characters can’t afford a secretary. They just want you to show them something better, hotter, and cool. Good luck on reaching them through email.
Topics: customer experience |