Electronic communications is the standard for many business transactions in today's small business organization; however, many small businesses still do not have adequate mechanisms for archiving correspondence with vendors, team members and customers.
In the past, I have worked for several organizations that took orders and performed trades for clients in the days when recording voice communications was an industry standard. For example, when an issue arose on a “sell” order that was given on a particular holding and the client later comes back and says they meant to instruct a “buy,” the tape could be replayed to confirm the actual order given, who took the order and any other details associated with this transaction.
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 hundred 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. The question you need to ask as a business owner is this: how much would one lost deal or one lost purchase order cost my business? Once you determine this cost, you have a value for archiving the information. Then the next step is sourcing a great vendor to provide this service for that client with that value.
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.
There are many solutions in the market today that offer archiving of emails from hosted solutions to corporate solutions that sit inside your corporate business network. Each solution has its strengths and its weaknesses and every business owner needs to evaluate which solution best fits their needs with the support of a trusted information technology consultant. Remember, your business needs drive the technology you eventually decide upon, not the other way around.
About the Author:
Stuart Crawford is a business leader in the Calgary, Alberta small business computer consulting marketplace. Stuart works with small business consulting companies across North America to ensure that they become successful. He can be reached at
http://www.youfactor.ca. Stuart also manages the Canadian Small Business Show at
http://www.canadiansmallbusinessshow.com.
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660
Date Published :
Feb 25 2007