TOOB Series: Turning Ordinary e-mail into Actionable Lifecycle Tasks

Leandro Goldberg,
Contributing Blogger/CRM Advisor -- Part of the TOOB Series (thinking out-of-box)

Here and there we're going to jump out-of-the-box with an occassional article that blends technology and alternative thought process. Being that it is the middle of the night and I'm not much of a sleeper, why not? We'll have to see if other TOOB articles follow this same trend of nocturnalistic inclination.

eMail is here to stay (forever) - if our planet is completely dessimated, somehow somewhere there will be an Exchange server that survivies. Companies are struggling today with the sheer volume of e-mail, and especially how to sort through thousands of message and know what constitutes a good message as opposed to junk. e-Mail filters are a good way to reduce the level of unnecessary e-mail, but there is still the problem with how to deal with the good stuff.

As the most widely accepted form of electronic communication, e-mail has become the standard for both business and personal use. Before you power on your computer tomorrow, take a moment and think about how many tasks are going to result from the average of a dozen to fifty e-mails that will be waiting for you. From those e-mails, how many of them are going to then spawn other tasks for other people?

The push is on for ways to reduce the amount of e-mail, thereby reducing the amount of storage that is required to archive terabytes of e-mail files. Traditional ERMS (e-mail response management systems) are focused primarily on facilitating self-service response and in many cases this adds to e-mail generation.

The optimal solution comes in the form of intelligent e-mail monitoring. Monitoring is relatively new technology that turns incoming e-mail into actionable tasks that can then be:

• managed by state changes (status management)
• automatically assigned to other people or "queues" using predictible workflow
• escalated and prioritized

The resulting tasks can also significantly reduce disk space by compressing attachments in binary form (BLOB). For example, you receive an urgent e-mail that requires a purchase order to be processed. The e-mail was sent to you but processing purchase orders is Mary Smith's job. In this scenario, e-mail monitoring technology would work as follows:

• the e-mail inbox where the message arrives would be monitored by a web service
• the e-mail would be processed and deleted by this service using user-defined rules
• the processing of the e-mail would include opening a task and assigning it
• the assigned task would create a notification message to the owner (text message, e-mail message, pager notification, etc.)
• the purchase order that was attached to the e-mail would be stored in an attachments tab of the task form

The e-mail notification to the recipient would include a link in it - when accessed it would bring the recipient to a page where he or she could access the task, whereby they can add activities to the task, change the status, re-assign the task, and more.

e-Mail monitoring that results in actionable tasks solves x major problems:

1. e-Mail is processed and deleted (as well as the attachment) immediately
2. Accountability from the original e-mail becomes enforced by having associated traceability in the form of a task
3. Storage is reduced - archives of the databases are significantly reduced due to BLOB storage and compressed database files.

These new capabilities are an important consideration for companies that are trying to reduce storage space with the added benefit of task management.

Leandro Goldberg



Email: lgoldberg@supportfusion.com
Comany: Support Fusion Inc.
Blog: supportfusion.blogspot.com