Common Mail Inbox overwhelmed!

sapper

Hi - my department currently has one e-mail address in which all mails are received. My staff currently have to go through each mail received to see if they need to do anything with it, but we get more than a 1,000 mails a day. I've asked our IT department here and they are clueless as to how we can manage the e-mails (and more importantly not miss any)

How does anyone/any big company manage large e-mail flows into one address? Are their systems/software packages available? At the moment we have a temp visually checking each mail and sorting it...

seamus

Best practice would mean that a single department would not usually have just one email address.

If it's a functional address such as info@whatever.com, then you should start phasing it out now and replacing it with addresses like accounts@, support@, general.queries@ and so on.

In the meantime, if someone is sorting the stuff by hand, then there's no reason why it couldn't be sorted automatically. If you're using Outlook or something like that, have a look at setting up rules, which can sort/forward emails based on words in the subject or body.

What kind of mail are you getting into this mailbox?

sapper

It's an address for our clients, and the thinking is the clients want to just have one e-mail address, even though their queries are varied.

I'm just thinking that government departments, large corporations must have some sort of automated system no?

Outlook rules are a bit dodgy as if a mail mentions a keyword and it's forwarded to someone, theres the risk that that person will ignore the e-mail instead of routing it back...

seamus

sapper wrote: »

I'm just thinking that government departments, large corporations must have some sort of automated system no?

Generally not. They tend to go for different addresses for different purposes. I work in a big corporate and we have no single point-of-contact address for our clients.
Our clients either have direct contact email addresses for the person who handles their account, or for new clients if they go on the website, they can get a direct email address for someone who deals in their industry. The number of clients and queries we get means that a single mailbox would be overwhelmed, as you put it.

Unless this email address serves a specific purpose such as billing, I don't think that people prefer mailing just one catch-all address. Response times are usually far quicker when you mail a specific-use address in my experience.

If there's really no way around it, then perhaps you need to look at distributing the workload between your relevant staff. If you have a callcentre-type setup, there is software that can read from a mailbox and then distribute incoming email to all the call centre agents who are logged in at the time.

irlrobins

Seamus raises a good point about specific use email addresses. I hate having to send email to info@domain.com addresses as I just know that my email will be in massive queue which means it will either not end up being addressed by the appropriate dept, lost, delayed, etc. I'd much prefer to have a choice of email addresses that allows me to direct my query to the most appropriate dept.

I get exasperated further if I get response to my email and have to reply to the same non specific email address as this means I'm unlikely to be dealing with the same person who responded. This often results in having to repeat my query for each new respondent.

If you find your company is overwhelemed with emails, then clearly the single email address is not working out.

seamus

Here's a good example of an info@ address that must a complete nightmare:

http://www.transport.ie/Contacts/index.asp?loc=344&LANG=ENG

They only show one email address but list details for what must be 30 different departments. I would presume on viewing that page, that if I emailed info@transport.ie I would probably never get an answer to my query.
It would make more sense to give each of these departments their own email address (and list it on this page) and leave the info@ for non-specific queries.

JDLK

There are many systems out there for sorting mailboxes such as IT support call management systems (CMS). Im not going to list any here because Im not sure what this sites policy on mentioning brands is but if you google call management system you should find a few