By Ludré Stevens – Inbotiqa, Chief Product Officer

The struggle to stay on top of the beast that is email can feel relentless. Perhaps it’s time to reinvent the strategy so we’re no longer fighting email, but taming it…

It’s hard to think of anyone in the back-office ecosystem who would not be familiar with the daily battle to keep a handle on out-of-control emails in inboxes and shared mailboxes. The constant struggle of ensuring emails are processed on time, preventing any being missed, managing folders efficiently, staying complaints amid myriad rules and regulations, and so on, saps resources and draws focuses away from tasks that truly add value.

As such, it’s rightly so that most back-office management and technology teams look to replace email. They generally do so by creating online portals to submit instructions, as opposed to emailing them. This is realised by building execution-management tools and user interfaces which are implemented using custom-built workflow systems or creating them in-house (an expensive option).

While all of these solutions work to a degree, they only resolve a slice of the issues around high-volume email traffic. They also tend to add a fair amount of additional manual work. All the while, our inboxes and shared mailboxes remain open on our desktops as they consistently contain work that is non-standard, of a high priority or introduces a new request or function that has not yet been prioritised.

What can often be forgotten are the intrinsic benefits of email. These are, after all, why billions of emails are sent each and every day, and why email remains such a popular form of business communication. Email is flexible in terms of what it can be used for, therefore ideal in complex business environments; it’s universally used – internally by businesses and externally between them and their customers; and it’s an official communication channel, used to convey information formally and on record with stakeholders. These are all great benefits.

The ideal solution, therefore, is to tame email by fixing the pain points, not fighting them. The main pain points being: how to track ownership; how to do this across entire organisations; and how to extract useful metrics and analytics out of this valuable data. Once this is possible, it enables the effective management of email-based processes through allocated task ownership. It also generates real-time data to identify slices of work within email and migrate them to specialist systems.

At iNBOTiQA, we created our YUDOmail solution with all this in mind. In a previous blog, our Director of Technology discusses in more detail the journey that has led us to the next step in taming the back-office email beast: YUDOsmart. With YUDOmail and YUDOsmart, we tame the beast that is email, then harness it to extract the latent power within, helping to cuts costs, boost productivity, reduce risk and improve customer service. It is possible to give up the fight and enjoy the benefits of tamed emails and inboxes.