SKYPE, Death of email?

We have just installed a Skype system here. Actually that makes it sound complicated, it is’nt. Nor is it expensive, time consuming or distracting. However it is really useful, especially if you have colleagues in remote locations that you want to speak to, or even see, for free! Voice and video calls for Skype to Skype calls cost nothing which makes it great if you have to make a lot of calls to the same user. We cannot recommend it highly enough.

In the next few weeks our Skype usernames will appear on all our correspondences to encourage our customers to utilise the option to make free calls to us – we will certainly be calling you for free!

At the moment, we have not got webcams hooked up for everyone yet, but its just a matter of time, soon you can put a name to the face without getting up out of your chair!

The system is another way to allow customers to more easily contact you and must be good for that reason alone, however the capacity to actually see one another takes things to a different level which should allow better, more efficient communication which allows us to migrate from one line emails bouncing back and forth.

There will be a place for email on an ongoing basis. But as a medium, it was not really tested or explored from a legislative point of view and postal mail is still clear from this aspect.  So it may become something of a curates egg unless a holistic communication program can be developed which integrates much of MS Outlook, with the benefits of Skype (or similar).