In the past one year I have not received a single email from a friend, all of them communicate with me directly or a in a group either on IM or Social Platforms. The simple reason, even they find email too slow. They simply send the message and they assume I would read it and if required respond to it.
The biggest reason of email becoming the new snail e-mail is because mailboxes are cluttered with emails. 88% is spam, rest of them are service transactions such as (tickets, credit card transactions, OTP’s etc.) or what I call them alert/notification emails. There are hardly any emails in my personal inbox that require response.
I still use email for sending attachments (would prefer to collaborate on Google drive, Dropbox or OneDrive) but I personally find email responses too slow. I had a banking issue, so I simply tweeted the bank. I got the response in five minutes, followed up with a phone call resolving my issues in 12 minutes. In comparison if I had sent an email. I would have received an auto-responder email with a ticket number that my issue will be resolved in 24 hours. Followed by an email from customer care with a standard answer, which probably would not have solved my issue. I might have called the call center and followed instructions of IVR before I could have spoken to a human.
If you see my Tweets and Replies I had in the past with companies i.e., https://twitter.com/nitinrajb/with_replies. You will notice all of them have same day responses.
People are moving towards Social Customer Service and are receiving responses much faster. As if the company does not respond, you can find the CEO on LinkedIn-send them an InMail or Tweet them.
In the past if you would have found the email of the CEO and send them an email, you do not really know if they received it, read it or simply forwarded it to the concerned department. But with Social Customer Service even the CEO of the company now has an obligation to respond.
If am really looking for a response from a senior person, I use the journalist approach, send an email, follow up on InMail, tweet them, call their office and finally get to speak to them. You may opt for an open letter on LinkedIn Pulse if you are still not receiving response.
Interestingly, Government of India is proactive on Twitter. A passenger tweeted to railways and tagged railway minister for food on 7 hour delayed train which had no pantry. The railways tweeted back within minutes asking for seat number and coach. After receiving response back from the passenger, they took swift action and provided for food and water to students and teachers who were on the train.