<story><title>Hum</title><url>https://letshum.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjackson</author><text>You make some excellent points about using email in a support organization. To be fair though, Hum isn&amp;#x27;t designed to be used by employees in a call center.&lt;p&gt;Instead, Hum addresses a much more fundamental shift in communication patterns that is already in full swing. Conversations are getting shorter and shorter, and more to the point. Most teens I know never check their email. Many of them don&amp;#x27;t even have email addresses.&lt;p&gt;Hum combines some of the core organization elements of email, like threads and subject lines, with features that many people have come to expect from their more modern IM&amp;#x2F;text&amp;#x2F;Twitter client like instant updates, presence, typing indicators, @mentions, etc. It strikes a balance between the two that helps bridge the gap from email to a much faster and more productive medium.</text></item><item><author>peteforde</author><text>Putting aside my own aversion to yet another opportunity to ramp up my continuous partial attention deficit, this strikes me as a solution looking for a problem.&lt;p&gt;One of my smartest friends noticed that when his support team answered emails quickly, the customer would treat this as an implicit invitation to shift the support thread into a support chat, via email.&lt;p&gt;They added a 3-hour delay before support sees any email, specifically to prevent threads from becoming chats. Note that phone support is also available; people with time-critical issues are encouraged to call in for immediate help.&lt;p&gt;The delay has been a huge success because people correctly assign priority to their concerns by selecting the medium. The back-and-forth is more focused and does not get off-track.&lt;p&gt;An unexpected bonus is that before the delay was introduced, people would often remember how one particular support rep helped them in the past and would hit reply on an old thread to pose a new question, unrelated to the original request. This was confusing (support people leave) and would mess up their issue tracking and happiness metrics.&lt;p&gt;After the delay, this behaviour went away almost completely and they didn&amp;#x27;t experience a statistically significant drop in incident satisfaction.&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, use email for email and use chat for chat. Email starts to feel like chat if you reply too quickly, and that&amp;#x27;s not a good thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>peteforde</author><text>About a year ago I started making a point of sampling all of the teens I found myself in conversation with — family dinners, speaking at high schools, friends&amp;#x27; siblings — and asking about their email usage patterns.&lt;p&gt;While it&amp;#x27;s true that they don&amp;#x27;t use email as a primary communication medium (yet) it seems likely that this is because they also don&amp;#x27;t have &lt;i&gt;jobs&lt;/i&gt; (yet) and that it&amp;#x27;s currently easier to talk to their friends via Instagram, WhatsApp and Tumblr.&lt;p&gt;And yet they all have email addresses, because otherwise there&amp;#x27;s no way to access most of the stuff on the web. You have to sign up, and unless you&amp;#x27;re talking about a phone-centric app like WhatsApp, there&amp;#x27;s no practical way to avoid email.&lt;p&gt;Even if you can login with Facebook Connect, you still need email to use Facebook.&lt;p&gt;So, can we dispel the myth that &amp;quot;teens don&amp;#x27;t have email&amp;quot; please?&lt;p&gt;----&lt;p&gt;As for my referencing a support operation delaying email, I used it as an example because I wanted to demonstrate that it wasn&amp;#x27;t a half-baked notion based on anecdotal evidence from one guy.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, conversations are most certainly NOT getting shorter. Each message in an exchange might itself be quite short, but the conversation itself really never ends.&lt;p&gt;Ask yourself what is more distracting: a long email or a series of 80 individual &amp;quot;short, to the point&amp;quot; texts, where each one vibrates your pocket and you have no idea when the next one is coming. You already know the answer. Often times you give up trying to do anything else and just stare at the messaging interface, waiting for the next message&amp;#x2F;fix to arrive.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t get me wrong; I use iMessage constantly and vastly prefer texting to calling people for most trivial things. But I also gave up IRC and ICQ (dating myself) cold turkey because eventually I was forced to acknowledge that it was holding me back in life. It was not more productive; it was incredibly counter-productive.</text></comment>
<story><title>Hum</title><url>https://letshum.com</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>mjackson</author><text>You make some excellent points about using email in a support organization. To be fair though, Hum isn&amp;#x27;t designed to be used by employees in a call center.&lt;p&gt;Instead, Hum addresses a much more fundamental shift in communication patterns that is already in full swing. Conversations are getting shorter and shorter, and more to the point. Most teens I know never check their email. Many of them don&amp;#x27;t even have email addresses.&lt;p&gt;Hum combines some of the core organization elements of email, like threads and subject lines, with features that many people have come to expect from their more modern IM&amp;#x2F;text&amp;#x2F;Twitter client like instant updates, presence, typing indicators, @mentions, etc. It strikes a balance between the two that helps bridge the gap from email to a much faster and more productive medium.</text></item><item><author>peteforde</author><text>Putting aside my own aversion to yet another opportunity to ramp up my continuous partial attention deficit, this strikes me as a solution looking for a problem.&lt;p&gt;One of my smartest friends noticed that when his support team answered emails quickly, the customer would treat this as an implicit invitation to shift the support thread into a support chat, via email.&lt;p&gt;They added a 3-hour delay before support sees any email, specifically to prevent threads from becoming chats. Note that phone support is also available; people with time-critical issues are encouraged to call in for immediate help.&lt;p&gt;The delay has been a huge success because people correctly assign priority to their concerns by selecting the medium. The back-and-forth is more focused and does not get off-track.&lt;p&gt;An unexpected bonus is that before the delay was introduced, people would often remember how one particular support rep helped them in the past and would hit reply on an old thread to pose a new question, unrelated to the original request. This was confusing (support people leave) and would mess up their issue tracking and happiness metrics.&lt;p&gt;After the delay, this behaviour went away almost completely and they didn&amp;#x27;t experience a statistically significant drop in incident satisfaction.&lt;p&gt;In conclusion, use email for email and use chat for chat. Email starts to feel like chat if you reply too quickly, and that&amp;#x27;s not a good thing.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>fournm</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s rather hard to believe that any number of them wouldn&amp;#x27;t have an email address, considering everything they would use in place of it requires an email address to sign up for.&lt;p&gt;Are they mostly talking to friends via email? Probably not--I don&amp;#x27;t think that&amp;#x27;s ever been the case with teens--but I can&amp;#x27;t imagine that they just flat out do not have an account anywhere.</text></comment>