The Problem
Our client was receiving a large number of emails every day, his email was already spam filtered so he’d taken care of that (that’s one of the first things we would have advised on!). He’d already taken steps to build up a knowledgebase of articles relating to the most common queries (and some of the uncommon ones), but was tired of answering the same query time and time again.
The Office Automation Solution
We created a range of scripts which would scan his inbox on an hourly basis and taken action on as much of his email as possible (in a very Inbox Zero fashion), with actions such as:
- Delete
Deleting anything that was blank, rude(!) or that he just wouldn’t want to read. - Delegate
Forward the email on to a colleague, friend or anyone else for that matter – along with a cover note. - Respond
Based on a series of keywords found in the email we were able to respond with links to appropriate articles or information on his site.
- Defer
Place the item on an online ToDo list for him to action at a later date.
All these items were logged and placed into a report which was emailed to his own private blackberry address so he could see exactly what state his inbox and the business was in, leaving him to:
- Do
Respond directly to queries that the script couldn’t resolve (or follow-up queries), work on deferred items, or do exactly what he wanted to!
All in all this took our clients inbox away from him, and he found himself answering 10 emails per day, with a little fine tuning and additions to both the script and his knowledgebase we got this down to 3-4 emails a day.
Have you ever wished you only had to answer 3-4 emails per day, and all the rest were taken care of for you?