Taking email for granted?

While applications like customer relationship management, supply chain management and enterprise resource planning are more in vogue, and in the media, it would be interesting to gauge the hypothetical response of corporate executives and even private individuals around the world, should email become suddenly unavailable as a means of communication.

It is difficult to gauge what proportion of Internet traffic is composed of email, but it is clear that email is far and away the most commonly used business communication tool in the world.

The challenge

According to The e-Policy Handbook, by author Nancy Flynn, “130 million US workers send 2.8 billion email messages a day”. Estimates vary, but somewhere between 70% and 90% of all global email traffic falls into the category of “Dark Traffic”, which includes spam, directory harvest attacks (DHA), email denial of service (DoS) attacks, malformed SMTP packets, invalid recipient addresses, and other illegitimate messages.

Qualica's experience indicates that the business case for user experience management (UEM) investment is not so much a return on investment argument as a series of questions:

• “What would it cost my company not to receive the crucial contract/purchase order/sales agreement on time?”, or
  
• “What is the cumulative opportunity cost to my company, over several years, of all my end users waiting unnecessarily long for emails to arrive, or be sent?”

The solution

Email is one of the business tools people need to be able to take for granted. In order to be able to do so, it is crucial that business and IT leaders ensure that corporate email infrastructure is operating efficiently. If it is not, they should feel obliged to identify and eliminate any threats to email and, by extension, business efficiency as soon as possible.

Not only does this process improve a company's email infrastructure itself, but several ancillary benefits also accrue. For example, a streamlined email system used by customer-facing staff can lighten the call volumes on call centre infrastructure.

UEM, when correctly applied to an email infrastructure, allows business leaders to gain access to critical information, identifying the experience that users have when using their corporate email infrastructure, and drilling down to the root causes of any symptoms identified. Automated software “robots” can impersonate users completing both internal and external email transactions on the company's servers, and provide updated reports and alerts when immediate action is required.
There are three aspects to this reporting:

• Management level reporting - including trends, overall improvements or reductions in service levels
  
• Technical reporting - technical staff can drill down to the component level of the problem
  
• Alerts - real time reporting, allowing for improvements to ensure that service level agreements are met. Alerts can be via SMS or email, or integrate with a network monitoring system to enable immediate troubleshooting

The virtual robots used to impersonate users log information such as the email's total travel time, the time taken for each step of the transmission, the time taken to connect to the email server, the login time and the time spent in the user's outbox. The robots also simulate transactions from various locations, within the company, within the local town or city, or across the globe.

While the individual costs of problems on a local user's computer may be regarded as small, the cumulative costs on many computers over an extended period of time can add up to millions of rands, and a solution that identifies the causes and allows them to be addressed swiftly can easily pay for itself. Whether it's a newspaper using an email system to file its story for publication, or a medical aid administrator using email to reduce its call centre volumes and improve customer relationship quality, the added value of UEM for corporate email is clear.