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Does your email archiving system provide you with key business intelligence?

Donal McGuire- Waterford Technologies A powerful email archiving solution can generate reports that will give you invaluable information about your business and

Donal McGuire- Waterford Technologies

A powerful email archiving solution can generate reports that will give you invaluable information about your business and answer questions such as; should we close for bank holidays?

Yesterday, Monday 3rd August, was a Bank Holiday in Ireland and Scotland. In the England, Wales and Northern Ireland the Bank Holiday is 24th of August. As an aside the August Bank Holiday in all of these islands was the first Monday in August until it was changed in 1971. A few years ago on the August Bank Holiday I was walking towards Liverpool city centre behind a group of foreign students. The shop that they were hoping to visit must have been one of the few in the city that was closed for the day. I overheard the students talking amongst themselves as to why the shop was not open for business. One then looked towards me and I volunteered the explanation that “today is a Bank Holiday”. The students clearly did not understand and when I had finished explaining Bank Holidays, when they fell etc. they couldn’t stop laughing! For them the concept of a Bank Holiday appeared to be alien. I don’t know where they were from and I certainly wouldn’t want to live there!

All businesses are aware that there are certain times of the year when their customers are not ‘open the business’, or it is not the time to engage in business effectively and efficiently. For many it borders on the pointless to attempt to conduct business discussions, and / or transactions during the last two weeks in December and the first week of January. No great analysis of your systems is required to reach such a conclusion. The period around Easter is often viewed in a similar way. These periods are so notorious that ordinary business activity can be organised around these occasions.

An email archiving system with powerful reporting features can help a business to identify those periods during the rest of the working year when business can be conducted in the most effective, efficient and cost effective manner? Such reporting features should be able to assist you to determine;

  • When is the best time to commence a sales campaign?
  • When are those multiple e-mails being read and acted upon?
  • When in the day are most emails sent?
  • When are the peaks and troughs in activity within your business?
  • Internally and externally who are your top senders and recipients of emails?
  • Who are the top domain names that are sending emails to your business?
  • What percentage of such emails have no relevance to your business?
  • Are emails being read and acted upon in a timely fashion?

Such reporting features will help you to pro actively manage compliance within your business and enforce policies and monitor employees non-business email. You will be in a better position to implement, enforce and amend such policies for the benefit of all within your business.

An email archiving solution should do much more than reduce your e-mail storage. It should generate reports that gives you an insight into your business and the way it is actually operating and enable you to analyse the critical business information that you have within your organisation of which, up to now, you may not have been fully aware. There is only one August Bank Holiday in the year but there are another 200+ working days which if you were to look at them more closely may well assist you in making your business more productive and profitable.

If you would like to find out more about our email archiving solution, give us a call today!