What does unmanaged email look like?

For most working professionals, waking up to an unmanaged inbox and being unable to see critical correspondence across the wider business is accepted as the norm. Very rarely will you find someone who enjoys opening their work emails.

Unfortunately though, email management usually isn’t front of mind within many organisations. Especially when bigger picture topics like cybersecurity, cloud migration and digital transformation initiatives keep rearing their heads. These initiatives can take years to complete and require serious investment.

But solving email management challenges is a quick win with significant benefits. After all, doing nothing which is the easiest option means enhanced levels, poor productivity, and low levels of visibility across teams.

Have you ever been in these situations?

“It’s in an archive somewhere.”

“This isn’t what we agreed.”

“When did you tell us this?”

“John has left the company, so I’m coming into this a bit cold.”

“Mary has that information, but she’s on leave this month so
I’m not sure where the project is at.”

“I wonder if we’ve sent that.”

“Did we ever hear back about that?”

“Forward me that email.”

The importance of emails

All project and client information is important, and email is typically used to send and receive these updates from documenting approvals, change requests and more. Email provides a clear timeline of who said what and when. But more often than not, emails get locked away in individual inboxes which are inaccessible to the wider team. This is a huge issue when someone leaves an organisation or is on holiday.

If information doesn’t get to the right person at the right time, it can cause huge complications with project and client work. In fact, poor communication and email management practices can impact timing, budgets and cause poor business decisions, costing firms millions of dollars every year.

The unseen cost of poor email management

Did you know that the average worker spends 5-hours per day checking their work emails? Despite that, only 46% can clear their inbox. That’s a result of more than 319 billion emails being sent and received every day.

This email overload can completely railroad your day and has impacts on employee’s productivity levels. Every time an employee stops what they’re doing to open an email, they lose focus on the billable work they’re doing, and it takes a whopping 23-minutes to get that focus back. So, if this happens just five times a day, that worker would have wasted nearly two hours of valuable time or one full working day per week.

While email overload may sound trivial, Ideagen Mail Manager, the Outlook email management add-in developed by Arup, has developed an ROI based on the time and money we can save you. The solution saves three hours per week for the average employee, who costs their business £15 per hour, which adds up to a cost saving of £180 per user per month. For an organisation with 100 users, that means a total saving of £18,000 in billable hours!

Unmanaged emails can quickly get out of hand

Without an email management solution in place, employee’s inboxes and quickly get out of hand. And most businesses don’t do anything to proactively solve this headache, of course, unless they are hit with a court case that requires them to prove who said what. Then, it’s a scramble to reproduce all relevant correspondence that can be found. This can take weeks, sometimes even months, if at all. This means it becomes almost impossible to meet your email obligations and other compliance initiatives.

Take back control over your inbox with Ideagen Mail Manager

Does your business send and receive hundreds of emails a day? Ideagen Mail Manager can help you standardise email filing across the business to a centralised location, reducing risk and improving productivity. Our software is built with artificial intelligence and machine learning at its core, meaning we automate the admin-intense activity that is email filing, saving you time, and reducing business risks. Plus, we follow your existing file structure meaning we don’t host any data, and your existing privileged access policies remain intact.

Any filed correspondence relating to a project or client can be found within three clicks by the people in your organisation who need to find that information, improving your overall information visibility, and meaning you don’t need to worry about not being able to find project and client information years down the line.

All of this makes for strong audit trails, easy compliance with industry requirements or quality assurance measures you strive towards, and complete document and records management within your organisation.

"Ideagen Mail Manager allowed us to systematically file our emails into a secure and backed up location. So, we've benefitted in multiple ways. Ideagen Mail Manager additionally solved our inbox storage issues, as well as improved staff productivity as emails are now filed out of an inbox, keeping it clean and organised. Every email sent and received is automatically filed, so you’re never frustrated by a chaotic inbox.”

Martin McKeith

Architectural Advisor, Health Service Executive

“Ideagen Mail Manager is an unsung hero, which has saved our bacon numerous times, where we have managed to locate emails quickly as evidence of what the client has said, sometimes years ago.”

Steve Burton

Associate Director, Ardent Consulting

“It gives us easy access to the information we need, and security in terms of being able to defend ourselves in case of a lawsuit or something in the future. Ideagen Mail Manager enhances the coverage that we get in terms of filing our emails, close enough to 100% that I can sleep at night.”

Rick Bernstein

IT and Software Specialist, BKSK Architects

“Ideagen Mail Manager is an integral part of our document management system. As we are often involved in litigation and regulatory issues, we needed a system that gave us complete confidence. Implementing Ideagen Mail Manager enabled us to be able to significantly reduce the amount of time and effort spent in searching and retrieving documents.”

Kate Barnet

Principal, Olvera Advisors

“The key was to be able to file emails very quickly because there are hundreds every day. It saves us a lot of time and we’re able to get documentation stored in a central repository that anyone can access. And the search functions ability to be able to go back and find correspondence easily. It’s a godsend and paid for itself overnight.”

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