The challenge

Brighter Green Engineering saw the risks of losing information and the history of projects resulting from someone leaving the organisation. Mark said: "On at least two occasions I can think of, senior people in the business deleted all their sent items, or they deleted the whole inbox, and we didn't have an effective email back up, and it costs money to do that. You can have Mimecast, but we tended not to have that at the time, and, therefore, we lost a lot of key project history when people did that."

"The other problem was because we manage sites for quite a long period of time. When something breaks, the owner will come back and check the history of the site to see if we have been adequately maintaining the site. Have we informed them about the things that are broken? Have we promptly addressed issues as they've come up? And so on. Knowing the history of communication with the customers can be quite important to address some of those, which can become legal challenges."

On the importance of being able to access correspondence, Mark said: "It was also about making sure we had a repository for all of that project history, particularly to do with a site, in an organised way so we knew if those issues came up, we knew where to go to pick that up."

Mark adds on the importance of filing information: "If everyone's filing in the right way, then the new person has a repository of history they can go to and just say, ‘okay, what's happening with this item?’ And they can search and find the history as they need to. So solving our email problem was both preservation of legal records and project history, and covering for people leaving the business and losing knowledge when that happened."

The results

When discussing the benefits Mail Manager brought to Brighter Green Engineering, Mark said: "Mail Manager gives us the knowledge that important information is where it needs to be and has added a degree of peace of mind. I'm now not exposed in the way that I was in the past."

On the benefits to the wider team, Mark added: "Quite often there will be a long lag in communication with the owner over an issue, and we may have had a change of personnel. So having somewhere the team can go and search and find the history of an item is really important because then they can gain this peace of mind as well."

Mark particularly likes how Mail Manager works seamlessly within Outlook, and his favourite feature is the search tool: "If you need a more detailed search, you can always pull up the powerful Mail Manager search, which gives you alternatives for how you can investigate items, and that's really helpful."

"The best feature has got to be the search because actually, that's the nuts and bolts of it being able to look at that history. Everything is there. Even if you haven't filed an email in quite the right folder, you can still search across all the folders. So, it's just a beneficial way of accessing communication quickly, that isn't just your own but across the whole business."

Mark summarises Mail Manager: "Mail Manager basically organises your communication in a centralised location. Being disciplined about how people manage their emails is key for me as a business manager, and I think it's a vital element to having a successful business."

"Mail Manager helps you unify and harmonise your correspondence. It’s not about harmonising what you're saying; It's about harmonising how you organise your communication. And I think that's incredibly valuable."