You receive an email, you reply—what seems to be the problem? Well, it arises over time…

And it can be nasty... 

Even the simplest task may seem an insurmountable obstacle when the volume of work increases. At first look, correspondence seems to be a fairly simple process: you receive an email, you reply. However, a few months later, when you try to find that specific item of correspondence, you can easily end up spending quite an amount of time looking for it, blaming the ‘ghost in the machine’ that ‘deleted it’ in the process. That’s where you can first notice glimpses of a possible process nightmare lurking in the background. 

Very often, this issue is either delegated to administrative assistants (who always manage to come up with ingenious solutions for keeping track of everything in Excel) or simply accepted as yet another frustrating part of the job. We don’t even perceive this time as wasted, since we were sitting at a computer trying to get our work done. Such 'incidents' can sum up to quite a chunk of the workweek. When multiplied with the number of employees, it can pose a significant impediment to company’s effectiveness.

Companies that recognize the need to employ a correspondence management solution, pretty soon understand the benefits. It helps optimize daily activities, improves document security and contributes to making the company leaner.

Every once in a while, in some department tasked with handling a specific communication problem (e.g., tracking donation requests), someone complains about the sheer volume of correspondence and reminds of the necessity of keeping track. They will probably come up with an Excel sheet of their own or—if they are lucky enough—even manage to persuade the department to invest in a piece of software, but that rarely solves the problem at a corporate level.

Companies that recognize the need to organize and employ correspondence management tools, pretty soon understand the benefits. They can attest that it helps optimize knowledge workers’ daily activities, improves document security and provides employees with information necessary to execute everyday tasks—and thus contributes to making the company leaner.

In its essence, correspondence management is a simple process with a beginning, middle and end. At the outset, the most important thing is to systematize and organize inputs from a variety of sources and channels into a single system. Some items of correspondence will arrive via 'old school' mail, most by email, and some through fax. They all need to be categorized and stored into the system. Whenever possible, automation of this process is highly desirable. Document scanning is an opportunity to extract some information through OCR. Asking specific partners to send their mail to dedicated accounts can turn out to be half of the effort required for classification. There are endless ways in which organizing this part of the process can be useful later on.