Business Communication Tips

Call, Email, or Text?

As technology changes, so does how we communicate. We are constantly trying to decide how we should communicate something with a particular person … email, text, phone call, in-person? I wanted to share some tips that most people agree to be good business etiquette regarding communication.

Medium	Reasonable Response Expectation	Appropriate Uses
Phone	Immediate (synchronous communication)	Important, urgent or complex topics
Email	Within 1 business day	Non-urgent items, when the responder may need time to gather info to respond, or if you want a record of the communication
Text	Varies greatly, typically 2 minutes to 2 hours … maybe never (see section below)	Informal topics that aren't urgent or important

Set Rules for Email-to-Phone Escalation

One Senior VP in a Fortune 500 company recently said that he's established a simple policy with his direct reports that has cut email volume by almost 40%: once a decision generates more than four emails total in a thread, someone needs to pick up the phone to resolve the issue.

Text/SMS Message Unreliability

Has anyone ever asked “Did you get that text I sent?” and you didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. Let me explain what might be going on there. Unlike email, SMS message delivery is not guaranteed. Instead SMS messages are delivered by service providers on a “best effort basis.” So when the network is congested most carriers automatically switch to a “store and forward mode”, which places all incoming text messages in a queue and defers their delivery until the network congestion and higher-priority voice traffic subsides. Usually that just means the messages are delayed, but in some cases those queues are never emptied or the messages may not be delivered until long after their relevance has passed. Various studies have shown that 1-5% of messages are lost entirely, even during normal operation conditions.