Email may seem like an unlikely obstacle holding back major logistics companies and costing them significant amounts of money. However, outdated email practices are increasingly costing these organisations both financially and by preventing them from communicating with customers effectively.
How email costs logistics firms
Inefficient email management processes result in businesses struggling to meet customer demands and employees failing to be as productive as possible. In terms of the cost to the business, email causes five key financial issues for logistics firms:
1. Email volume: The number of emails in circulation is increasing exponentially. Statista research finds 319.6 billion emails were sent through 2021, equating to just under one billion every day. And that figure is set to increase to 376.4 billion daily emails by 2025!
This email volume runs the risk of employees missing messages or leaving them sitting in their inbox for hours before finally getting around to answering them. And for logistics companies, that could result in the customer taking their business elsewhere. Customers now have higher expectations of excellent service, so making them wait for a response is increasingly likely to see them turn to a competitor.
2. Communication silos: Customers increasingly expect 24/7 service and availability from businesses and, if they don’t, they’ll take their business elsewhere. This makes it critical to have teams available to deal with customer inquiries and requests around the clock and for customers from all locations. Therefore, logistics firms need to ensure all customer service employees have access to the same data and customer interactions to prevent communication silos.
3. A drain on employee time: The average employee spends 11 hours or just under one-third of their time (28%) managing email. That means employees waste a third of their working time sorting through unnecessary inbox clutter, responding to requests from customers and colleagues, or finding information from the depths of their inboxes. This is valuable time that ought to be spent dealing with product order shipments and ensuring deliveries are processed effectively and smoothly.
4. Communication tool overload: Logistics firms rely heavily on email for a wide range of everyday tasks. However, it’s not the only tool they rely on to get their work done. Most use a complex combination of customer relationship management (CRMs), eCommerce platforms, 3PL software, online form submissions, embedded chat, chatbots, and instant messaging capabilities. Furthermore, most of these tools rely on email to get users registered and provide alerts to employees. However, this mass of communication tools can lead to complicated workflows and employees constantly switching between solutions, making it harder to get the job done.
5. A lack of visibility: Logistics firms’ use of email enables teams to communicate with customers around the clock, but the solutions they use to do so often lack visibility. Left to their own devices, employees will rarely file emails in the same way and will inevitably store emails within their individual inboxes and desktop folders. This leads to issues with data storage and prevents other employees from finding important emails, such as customer orders that could go missing and unfulfilled.
How Mail Manager helps logistics firms
Mail Manager enables logistics firms to enhance collaboration, better manage their email inboxes, and ensure critical data is secure, easily discoverable and quickly accessible to all employees. The solution ensures all emails, both sent and received, are stored in centralised folders, which means they’re always available to everyone who has access to the folder. This prevents employees from storing emails in their own inboxes, which is crucial to accessibility, collaboration and preventing data loss.
Mail Manager uses artificial intelligence (AI) to learn every user’s filing habits and store emails and documents in the most appropriate location. It also uses AI to power data discovery, which ensures any employee can find any attachment, document or email from a database of millions of files in just a few seconds.
Crucially, Mail Manager offers significant cost savings as employees no longer store emails locally, which offers substantial data storage savings. Mail Manager is also simple to implement, can be integrated with any file management infrastructure and users can be up and running on the solution within 24 hours with minimal training.
Improved deliverability: Logistics firms can help their teams to make the right decisions by ensuring they always have the correct, up-to-date information about customer orders and delivery approvals.
Reducing risk: Logistics firms need to ensure their critical data, such as customer records, order details and financial information, is secure at all times. Mail Manager helps them protect their email communications while enhancing the visibility of critical data.
Increased collaboration: If a team member happens to be away or leaves the organisation, data can become unavailable or lost forever. Mail Manager ensures complete visibility of a project, as opposed to just the information in individuals’ inboxes.
Mail Manager helps logistics firms guarantee documents and emails won’t go missing, are centrally located and are easy for all employees to discover when they receive urgent client requests. This offers significant cost savings and minimises the chances of businesses missing product orders or losing customers to a competitor.
Discover how Mail Manager can transform your email and document management processes with a free trial.
