Performing two or more tasks in rapid succession. It almost doesn’t seem like multitasking at all, but our minds need time to change gears in order to work efficiently. According to research, multitasking can impact productivity by as much as 40%. The cost of this could be huge, with an increased risk of mistakes and errors.

In the context of emails at work, this is easy to relate to. If you get to the end of the day, look at your to do list, and wonder what you’ve actually achieved, it might be that you’re spending too much time on mundane processing tasks and not enough on strategic initiatives. These days, a machine should be able to handle the automated processing, leaving you to focus on the issues that really require your attention.

So if you’re looking for ways to better meet your personal and team objectives, you should be looking for ways to automate how you process your ‘simple’ emails, so that your team can stay focused on handling more complex cases, with improved efficiency and a reduced volume of work.

Firstly, you need to identify these ‘simple’ emails.  This requires a level of sophistication in how your software automatically categorises and prioritises your emails (something which Outlook doesn’t address nearly as well as other email management software, some of which includes Natural Language Processing).  Following this, you can then start to accommodate your business scenarios, and let the system handle the responses. For example, if a customer is seeking a status update, or their query can be addressed by one of your FAQs.

This automation should be extended to trigger proactive updates, reminders and follow-up actions, meaning nothing gets missed, and reducing inbound contacts (as customers are less inclined to contact you since you’ve contacted them first).

Not only does all this make your operations more efficient, but also – importantly – improves your customer experience with faster response times, a better quality of response, and improved expectation management.

Take a look at our case study to find out how we created a bespoke email management solution for a client, leading to an increase in advisor productivity from eight to 22 processed emails per hour.