The importance of automated mandatory filing in email management

15 Sep The importance of automated mandatory filing in email management

I have previously touched on how poor email filing discipline ie filing or storing emails, can cost an organisation money, increase the company’s risk or increase customers frustration because their information cannot be found quickly. It can also make a colleagues job a lot harder and more frustrating, wasting time trying to find information that has not been stored in a specific customer, project or supplier file.

Whilst having experienced these problems ‘first hand’ in several of my CIO roles, it’s something which can be difficult to solve because it involves changing staff/peoples working behaviour. Change can be complex and difficult and I have to admit I didn’t always get it right!

When I think about my past experience of colleagues email filing discipline, some of my business colleagues were diligent in filing their business related emails but many were not. This is perhaps not wholly surprising, after all, there is always more interesting work to be getting on with.

One way I found to help solve this difficult problem is through the use of automation. This could be either through the use of automatic filing or by presenting a small number of filing options to users at the point they read their emails. I have now had extensive experience of working with professional services organisations and addressed the objections raised to such an approach. There is initially either a fear they will lose control or non-business related emails will be stored with the business related emails.

Getting the balance right between supporting the organisation and supporting the staff needs is important which is something we at Knowledgemill take extremely seriously. Our intelligent machine learning email filing system can be set-up to support different business departments or even individual members of staff in different ways while still meeting the business objective of creating a central store of email correspondence that can be used to support customers, suppliers and projects.

Knowledgemill works seamlessly as part of Microsoft Outlook (Office 365 or Exchange) and integrates with the document management system of your choice or the native Knowledgemill DMS.  It also provides a full filing capability for iPhones, iPads and Android phones.

At Knowledgemill we have been working with many organisations to solve their operational email management problems, Legal firms, construction firms, accounting firms or professional services organisations. Click on the link www.knowledgemill.com to find out more.  We would be pleased to demonstrate/discuss how Knowledgemill works with your existing systems and how it could help your organisation.