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May 26, 2017
Call, Email, or Text? The communication choices abound. Add social touch points in the mix and you really have a mess.
We at the WORLD FAMOUS PunchDrunk Digital Ad Agency even add another layer of complexity because the majority of our team works in a virtual environment (fancy words for Work From Home… cue Fifth Harmony song) and many of our partners are scattered across the world. We want our team and our partners to know we are always in their corner, but what’s the best way?
So, for funsies we did a little experiment and thought we would share the results with you. To make our elementary school science teachers burst with pride, we used the Scientific Method. For this experiment we took out personal visits as an option so that all things could be more equal as personally seeing some people wasn’t an option during out experiment time frames.
Question: What is the best way to communicate in today’s business environment?
Hypothesis: Texting will result in fastest response times, phone calls will provide best accuracy and less need for follow up.
Materials: Phones, Emails, Social Platforms
Procedure: We used a two week window and tested multiple communication options with different partners and internal team members. We recorded the response times, if there was a need to follow up (meaning we didn’t have the full answer or answer was unclear to us from our first communication), and if there was a need for additional conversation on same top how many more messages/phone calls were carried out before answered in full.
Results: Interesting! Everyone was vastly different. We learned that you need to adjust your communication with each partner/internal team member. Using just one or two methods to communicate with everyone is not recommended. Just like snowflakes, no two people are the same. If you were forced to select just one communication type, Calling someone has the lowest amount of follow up exchanges and ties texting for the fastest response times. See the table below.
Conclusion: Digital Marketing takes Digital Conversations and lots of Follow-Up ?.
| Partner / Team Member | Communication Type | Average Response Time | # of Follow-Up Exchanges |
| A | Phone Text Social | < 8 Hours > 4 Hours > 10 Minutes > 2 Hours | 0 2 11 0 |
| B | Phone Text Social | > 2 Hours > 2 Hours < 8 Hours < 8 Hours | 1 5 0 0 |
| C | Phone Text Social | > 4 Hours > 2 Hours > 10 Minutes < 8 Hours | 2 7 3 1 |
| D | Phone Text Social | < 8 Hours > 8 Hours > 2 Hours > 4 Hours | 0 2 5 2 |
| E | Phone Text Social | > 10 Minutes < 8 Hours > 6 Hours < 8 Hours | 1 3 12 1 |
| F | Phone Text Social | < 4 Hours > 10 Minutes > 6 Hours > 8 Hours | 3 4 6 0 |
| Communication Type | Average Response Time | of Follow-Up Exchanges |
| Phone | > 6 Hours | 1.2 |
| > 5 Hours | 3.8 | |
| Text | > 4 Hours | 29 |
| Social | > 8 Hours | .6 |
