In the race for better customer experience, have we forgotten email?
Right now, businesses are spending big on CX platforms, workflow automation, CRM systems, chat tools, and AI assistants. And yet, email is still doing the heavy lifting. Statista says we sent and received 376 billion emails a day worldwide in 2025, estimated to climb to 424 billion by 2026, with 4.6 billion people using email across the globe. What this means? Email is not going out of style. It's the one channel you really can't afford to get wrong.
Your customers are talking to people, not workflows
Here's the thing: Your customers are people, treat them as such.
They don’t care about your fancy workflows or systems. They are interacting by email with a company they trust or think they can trust, and they deserve an appropriate and human email response. The inherent nature of email can make this challenging for a growing business.
Why customers choose email
- Proof: Your sent items remain as proof of what was sent and when and you have something to follow up on with a factual timeline.
- Flexibility: You can send one or many requests in an email format with one or more file attachments.
- Open standard: Anyone can use email. You do not need a specific app or account on one brand network.
- No algorithms: Messages arrive in the order sent whereas social sites hide posts or show ads instead of real updates.
- Work standard: Offices use email for official records and files. It feels formal and stable for work.
- Direct control: You own your inbox. You do not lose your data if a company shuts down or changes its rules.
- Cost: Email costs nothing!
With the above in mind, businesses must take note of the risks attached to email, namely:
An unanswered email is a business risk
And that bad experience costs you. Research shows more than half of customers will walk away after just one bad experience, and 73% will leave after a few. So that email sitting unread in a shared inbox? It's not just an oversight; it's putting your customer relationships, your reputation, and sometimes your compliance on the line.
Growth makes this harder, not easier
As your business grows, so does your mailbox volume, and the confusion about who owns what, how fast people are actually replying, and what's quietly disappearing into a black hole. At that point, knowing who's responsible and seeing the full picture isn't a nice-to-have. It's what keeps your service, and your compliance, intact. At this point, it’s worth looking into a business tool that can manage email at high scales.
Email is still how business gets done formally
Think about it: contracts, quotes, approvals, regulatory notices, complaints; they all still operate through email. Why? Because email gives you a timestamped, searchable paper trail. When someone asks, “Who said what, and when?” Email is where you go to find out.
It's time to manage email like it matters
None of this means ditch automation. It means pointing it at email itself: smarter routing, response tracking, tighter security, better reporting, real governance. Give the channel your customers already trust, the attention it deserves. The very fact that email is the core chosen communication for customers and business clearly reinforces the importance of it.
Email isn't going anywhere. It's still the thread that ties your people, your decisions, and your outcomes together, and the businesses that manage it well, are the ones customers keep coming back to.
About Kunye Cloud
Kunye Cloud is a South African shared inbox and service-level-agreement (SLA) tracking platform built to solve a problem nearly every customer-facing business shares: email works as a communication medium but fails as a management system.
As the technology partner of Kunye Cloud, founded by Alister Brown in 1999, Chouette has a 20+ year track record of designing, building, and supporting enterprise quality applications.
Sources
- Statista, “Number of e-mails sent and received per day worldwide,” 2025 figure and 2026 forecast; global email user base, 2020–2028.
- Zendesk, Customer Service Statistics (Zendesk Benchmark data), 2026.