Email is very quickly becoming the main communication medium for business transactions in small business organisations; however, very few of them have an adequate mechanism to archive correspondence with vendors, clients and internal staff.
I have been involved in situations where customers said that they had been quoted less on products, but I could not prove them wrong as I was deleting all my old emails and by the time they placed their order, I did not have email evidence of the communications or simply could not find it quickly enough to raise issues.
So, why do businesses today need to be archiving their electronic correspondence?
Many transactions in today’s business are now done electronically. There are several thousand emails floating around the Internet at any given second. Phone orders and other forms of queries to be a business are being reduced while the number of email messages is drastically increasing.
With this increase in electronic messages, the possibility of missing messages also increases. This can lead to client frustration and loss of business. Electronic communications can also compromise confidential information and corporate secrets. Finding and defending these problems is why business today needs a great solution for archiving all emails and having a retention plan for keeping these messages.
Compliance and regulatory legislation is now dictating that some lines of business have a strategy of recording every email that comes into a business or leaves a corporate network destined for an external resource. With these new rules affecting many lines of business, it is important for today’s business to have a strategy that is easy to use, robust and, most importantly, secure.
However, regulatory or compliance pressures should not be the main reason for you to look at a solution for archiving all correspondence coming in or leaving your business. As a business owner, you should keep your finger on the pulse of every bit of information circulating around your business.
You need to have an interest in all of this. You need to be able to pull information about a client, an order, and communication string between one of your clients at any time. Your business may one day depend on this– when you are sitting in a court room justifying the actions of one of your employees.
All businesses require a record of transactions that are easy to retrieve. There are many email archiving solutions available to all levels of business; these offer many different periods of archiving, and there are mechanisms that you can employ that range from a minimal investment to those that are quite expensive. SophiaEA has been designed to meet the needs of small and medium enterprises.
Employee abuse of corporate email is at an all time high. Employees need to realize that corporate email is for corporate use only. Make them aware that every email that an employee sends or receives in their corporate email account may be recorded and audited to ensure that all employees are using the corporate resource within the acceptable use guidelines set down by an organization. An email archiving solution can help small business owners ensure productivity remains high by serving as a reminder that corporate email accounts are only used for corporate communications.
All in all, sooner or later, any decent business which makes high use of emails will need to get an email archiving solution in place.
