Kevin King, boss of the Torquay web design company, raised his concerns at the monthly business breakfast at the Riviera International Conference Centre which took place earlier this week.
Mr King also forecast how he sees the relationship between businesses and the web in the future.
His company, Createanet, was founded in 1998 — at the same time as Google — dealing with just three to four e-mails a day. Today Createanet deals with 300 to 400 a day.
But the company could have grown quicker and larger had Mr King had the educated staff to hand, he said.
“I think I could have grown an awful lot quicker if I had got the staff to do the job. College education is about training people on these lovely courses, but things like coding websites just don’t form part of it.
“I think it’s a problem across the country — and it’s a problem down here. I am having to pay London wages now just to maintain staff.”
He said the ‘convenience’ of the web and access to the internet would increase in the future, with network systems such as The Cloud “possibly being the way forward”.
When asked about the future of the High Street and traditional shop selling, Mr King said: “The Internet needs to come into the shop — there needs to be more interaction.”
Mr King was guest speaker at the breakfast to give a presentation and put the question to businessmen and women: Is your inbox a ticking time bomb?
“It’s very easy to miss important e-mails,” he said “particularly complaints and urgent needs of clients, among the sheer volume of mail. Ignore them at your peril.
“Your inbox is now the recognised way of your clients getting hold of you. An overcrowded inbox can very soon lead to poor customer service, and as e-mail is one of the main ways businesses communicate, this is a problem that has to be addressed.”
He warned that, because of the personal nature of e-mail communication, this problem could often get out of hand before senior members of the company knew it existed.
He said the solution was to use a Ticket System — a ‘self-help’ system which integrates customer inquiries created via e-mail, phone and web-based forms into a simple multi-user web interface.