A quarter of Belgians (26%) regularly overlook important documents, invoices and fines because our mailbox is growing over our heads. That’s the main finding of a new survey by Doccle on email usage. Millennials in particular are frustrated with their mailbox, the survey shows, and they also most often overlook invoices and fines (40%). “Belgians have a love-hate relationship with e-mail,” said Bram Lerouge, CEO of Doccle. “We can’t live without it, but our inbox is a source of frustration.”
A representative survey commissioned by Doccle shows that Belgians cannot live without their e-mail. We use it very intensively: 84% percent of Belgians read their e-mail daily, and 57% even several times a day. Only a very small minority (7.4%) only reads their mail once a week or less.
But we do have a love-hate relationship with e-mail.
We find e-mail cluttered (34%) and time-consuming (34%). For 22%, the mailbox is even a source of frustration. Among young people, the feeling of frustration is even stronger: almost half (49%) find the mailbox cluttered, time-consuming (41%) and frustrating (34%). It goes so far that millennials prefer to avoid their mailbox: 30% “look at their email as little as possible.”
The reason for that frustration? Our mailbox is a mess. Almost half (48%) have trouble finding important mails among all the spam and advertising; among young people this rises to 61%.
Belgians have a love-hate relationship with e-mail: “confusing,” “time-consuming” and “frustrating”(but we do check our mail daily)
More than a hundred unread emails
The vast majority of Belgians (81%) must therefore regularly set aside time to clean out and organize their mailbox.
This is very necessary, since almost everyone has unread e-mails in their mailbox, ranging from twenty or fewer unread e-mails (34% of respondents) to more than a hundred unread e-mails (for 10% of Belgians).
Bram Lerouge, Doccle: “Email is a communication tool that has worked in the past, but the threshold for ad sending and spam is too low. Our mailbox is flooded with commercial messages and has become a jungle that we must permanently weed out. Add to that the huge security problem with phishing where it is getting harder and harder to distinguish fake messages. “
Unpleasant surprises: we miss invoices and fines in our inbox
Unpleasant surprises regularly fall out of the (letter) box during this digital cleaning operation.
3 out of 10 Belgians (29%) say they sometimes lose important documents in their personal mailbox. A quarter (26%) have overlooked an invoice or fine among their e-mails. Again: among millennials, this is even more pronounced. They say in 43% of the cases they have lost important documents and in 37% of the cases they have overlooked an invoice or fine.
Bram Lerouge, CEO Doccle: “Whereas the inbox for people over 55 is still faithfully maintained, millennials apparently have much less patience with the proliferation in their inbox. That costs them money – think dunning fees – but it’s also obviously a problem for senders when invoices go unpaid. Defaults are a major risk factor for organizations and companies, especially in economically uncertain times. With Doccle, we want to unburden the Belgian by offering a user-friendly and secure platform where administration remains clear. ”
Belgians are looking for better solutions
Almost 3 in 5 Belgians (58%) say they are interested in linking their personal mailbox to an app to which all their important documents and administrative mails are automatically sent.
Bram Lerouge, CEO of Doccle: “Belgians certainly don’t want to go back to paper invoices, although digital solutions do not yet seem to offer a sufficient solution. However, there is a clear demand for a solution: we want to keep our invoices, fines and other important documents separate from less important communications.”
Doccle is making an effort to provide that channel, according to Bram Lerouge.
Bram Lerouge: “With Doccle, we offer that inbox for ‘important business.’ Doccle is an advertising-free channel, so what ends up in the Doccle inbox is important communication anyway. Doccle is also a secure channel, and you can see at a glance which invoices have already been paid and which have not. It is clear, though, that efforts are still needed from companies, government and ourselves. Companies and governments need to move away from invoices and documents sent as an attachment to e-mail. E-mail is a playground for criminals and hackers.”
“In addition, we need to work with all players to make secure apps like Doccle even better known and more intuitive, for example through integration with Itsme. Doccle is the most relevant platform by integrating government documents via ebox on 1 platform. However, we continue to strive for further simplification and would also prefer not to see documents without FPS Finance content appear in the e-box. We will work very hard on this in the coming years with all those involved.”
