Do you fear your inbox?

Following the long holiday weekend here in the UK, there may have been one or two of us that dreaded the return to work on Tuesday and the potential build up of inbox messages waiting for an action. If it is anything like a previous role I had, it could easily be in the 100s!

Whether a desk at home, in the office or perhaps a table at your favourite café, no doubt many of us have the same routine for dealing with the swollen inbox – coffee prepared and a deep breath.

Before I go further, ask yourself, would I rather have a ‘type A’ or a ‘type B’ mailbox:

In any mailbox, a percentage of content will be junk (offers from a travel provider or a merchandise supplier you used once before) – deleted immediately – perhaps consider using unsubscribe to help clear these in the future. A few will simply be informative (the newsletter from a partner vendor or progress updates for a project) that you’ll read and potentially archive (more on that later…). 

Some will have subject lines that cause a cold spear of dread through your still beating heart – these you will ignore, unread, hoping desperately that they’ll just go away!

There will also be a chunk that need to be processed in some way, whether a simple acknowledgement or the completion of an action such as payment / order creation. Of those, a percentage will just be forwarded to another employee or department rather than actioned by yourself (again we will come to that…). In fact, as a percentage, I estimate only about 5% of the emails I used to wade through after a vacation or break actually needed action from me as the recipient!

If any of the above rings true then keep reading – there are ways to substantially reduce the time you and your fellow employees spend managing these emails and reduce the risk to your company from either missing transactions, deadlines, opportunities, failing compliance tasks or even losing existing clients!

Remember – “this is how it has always been done”, doesn’t make it right! Ask yourself:

• Should any of the email you receive simply be stopped – unsubscribe (the PacSol newsletter I hope remains as ‘essential’ reading)
• Should any of the email you receive be redirected to another individual or shared mailbox – ask the originator to update their records.
• Should any of the email (or its content) you receive be stored and retained for future reference – where should it be stored (hint: not in your email archive)

It should also be stated that the worst place to archive an email related to the company is in a personal mail archive.

If any aspect of the email you receive impacts your business’s processes (sales, accounts, HR etc) then it is likely that the content needs to be preserved and (most importantly) be in a secure yet sharable location – say for example, a document management platform. Most businesses with a document management platform use it for one specific purpose and don’t consider that it can and will store email correspondence / content which, with almost all business communication is conducted through this medium today, is essential. 

The great news is that whilst there are mail client integrations that can make the manual process of indexing email into a repository relatively easy, there are also automation tools that can be used to completely remove the manual store element and kickstart the business process related to that content. Email auto processors (such as PacSol’s Inbound Email Processor (IEP)) do not simply take the email content and generically store it in your document management platform, rather intelligent processing rules coupled with OCR efficiently and accurately index the object(s) so they can be easily searched, identified and reviewed.

Next month we’ll look at the capture of email, with a spotlight on PacSol’s IEP application and why it should always be archived as part of your document management platform. Continued in “Do you fear your Inbox (Part 2)“

Toby Gilbertson, Customer Services Manager. April 2022.

#PacSolUK #EnterpriseContentManagement #DocumentManagement #BusinessProcessAutomation #Email