Final Words

Hopefully, this ebook has helped you learn about the benefits and inner workings of outsourcing your company's email. Even if you ultimately decide this is not the right course for your business, or that it isn't the right way to cut costs at this juncture, you know have a much better understanding of one of the main methods of technological outsourcing and cost reduction available to businesses today.

If someday you do opt to incorporate outsourcing, let this ebook be your guide through the process. While the email service provider you choose should ultimately help you with the transition, you are at a much greater advantage if you go into the process with knowledge of your own. Knowing what specific services and functions you need ahead of time can save you a lot of grief later in the process. Knowledge isn't just power—it's also the ability to increase efficiency and effectiveness in your business environment.

When dealing with outsourcing companies and the changes that are coming for your organization, always remember first and foremost that the goal of this endeavor is to improve your company and make things easier in the long run. If anything seems to be working against you rather than for you, remember that you are free to change course. Don't let the momentum of a situation keep you on a path that is anything less than the best path for your company.

In the world of 21^st-century business, the specialization and division of business processes has the potential to streamline even the most difficult and stubborn element of technology. Be informed, be wise, and proceed down this new course, into this new paradigm with knowledge and forethought. If you do, the rewards are great, and the potential is unlimited.

Finding the Right Help for Email Processing

It goes without saying that you don’t want an unqualified stranger processing your email. When it comes down to handing over your email to a third party, you want to be sure that the individual (or organization) is the right one for the job. While your goal is the hand-off relatively simple tasks, this still means that you’re going to have another set of eyes looking at your documents and making decisions about what stays and what goes—or, at the very least, what gets immediately deleted and what gets passed on to you.

It makes sense, then, to take the necessary time to find the right individual or organization to help you with email processing. There are a number of ways to approach the problem—and the right solution is going to be different for every company or organization. The most important thing is that you choose something that makes you and your employees feel comfortable and that the solution matches your needs in terms of size and scope. For personal email pre-filtering, for example, you might find it easy (and economical) to hire a single freelancer who can work specifically with you to set up ground rules and criteria for the perusal of email. For a larger operation, you might want to choose a company or organization that has the manpower and resources necessary to screen emails on a larger scale.

Whatever solution you choose, be sure that you are clear about your expectations and needs right from the start. Remember that you’re handing over a vital part of your business’ line of communication, so it’s important that your method for screening out unnecessary emails has to match your company’s level of maturity and professionalism. Additionally, it can be important to consider to what extent an outside email processor should be allowed to participate in operations. It might be possible for this person to actually answer some of your emails (especially if they are repetitive or form-oriented) or take it upon him or herself to forward messages to more appropriate recipients. The way you use additional email screening is up to you.

How Will Pre-Screened Email Increase Productivity

When your email is pre-screened, you can choose to have only the most important messages get to you. Think of the kinds of messages that populate your inbox. Notifications of meetings, repeats of information you already have, minutes of last week’s meetings... the list goes on and on. By having a third party filter your email, you can assign the tasks of noting schedule changes, tossing out repeated information, or doing away with non-essentials to someone else—and reserve your valuable time for essential tasks only.

If you’re unsure about how this choice might affect your work life, take a few days to chart the purpose and utility of each email you receive. How many are unnecessary (meaning you wasted time simply in reading them)? How many contain basic information that could be compiled into a more-easily-read digest format? How many are restatements of information you already have? Chances are pretty good that no more than five or ten percent of the email you receive needs to be immediately read and taken action upon by you personally. The right email service could group these essential emails together for your immediate perusal.

Why Outsource the Handling of Email

In business, time, as the saying goes, is money. Today’s businesspeople are spending increasing amounts of time simply keeping up with the huge bulk of email that descends into their mailboxes each and every day. While modern spam-screening features and junkmail-jamming tools have made a big difference in the quality of material that gets to your mailbox, it’s not uncommon for an entire morning to pass in which you feel like you completed no work: you simply spent all of your time answering email.

No matter how important some of the messages are, answering email can be a major drain on your time and can effectively take you way from other office activities and functions. Sifting through the long list of emails in your inbox can eat up hours—and attempting to stem the onrushing tide by handling emails the moment they “ding” into your mailbox can mean that you never have more than two or three minutes of uninterrupted time to devote to “real” work projects and problems.

Outsourcing Emails and Handling Responses

If you’ve gotten this far through the text, you’ve read a plethora of information about effectively outsourcing your company’s email services through companies that will help you with servers, virus protection, and overall technical know-how. At the end of the day, however, this approach does not affect the amount of email you and your company will receive.

In businesses where email is a main source of communication, the pile of untouched and unread messages can grow sky-high (meaning it’s a good thing we’re keeping such missals in electronic form if only to cut down on actual, physical stacks of correspondence). Outsourcing the technical handling of your email processes is a great way to make it easier to handle the overall function of your email—but the next step can be to actually outsource the handling of your email.

Managing Staffing Issues

If your organization is anything less than gargantuan, having an in-house email connectivity department can be impossible. You might not have enough volume to warrant a full department of specialists to keep at your beck and call. What often happens, then, is that organizations rely on a single individual to keep systems up and running. Consider, for example, how often you depend upon the storied “IT Guy.” While it’s definitely smart to have someone on your staff who is well versed in computers and networks, you might not want to have your entire email operation ensconced in the knowledge of just one individual. If you were for some reason to lose that individual suddenly, would someone else be able to step right in? Probably not. Most systems rely as much on anecdotal on-the-job knowledge as book-learning—meaning that single individual is incredibly important to keeping things up and running. In the case of a sophisticated email system, it might be wise to keep functions outsourced to an external organization where there are many specialists ready to step in and take over should the need arise.

Lists and Backups

Build Better Black/White Lists

If, like many companies, you struggle with an onslaught of unwelcome email on a day-to-day basis, you know that it is important to filter out unwanted messages before they even make it to your inbox. For many companies, this can go above and beyond the filtering of spam (a services also offered by most email outsourcing companies). Instead (or additionally), you can build a complete list of accepted and unaccepted addresses to keep unwanted messages from attacking your inbox. Again, the right company will work with you to determine your needs and set you up with the right service for your organization.

Backup Systems and Outage Protection

If your company relies heavily on email for communications both inside and outside your organization (as many currently do), even a short temporary outage or disruption in service can be devastating, resulting in lost business and productivity. When you have your email operations in-house, outages are your problem: if something goes out, it is your responsibility to find a way to deal with it. When your email is outsourced, however, you don’t have to worry about outages negatively affecting your business. An email outsourcing company will have access to its own backup servers—meaning that disruptions in service will be fewer and more far between. Consider this: if your in-house server goes down in flames, you might wait 24 hours or more to get a technician to your location and find the root of the problem. In the meantime, you’ll be effectively crippled, with employees unable to send or receive email messages (an important daily activity in many offices). With an outsourced email system, however, you should get full service backup. If a server goes down, a reputable email company will have a backup server ready to take its place. Disruptions in service are simply much less of an issue when you use an outsourced email company.

Why Stop Now? Going One Step Beyond

Additional Services and Considerations

Outsourcing your company’s email represents a fairly major change in the way of managing day-to-day business. In addition to the upsides to outsourced email listed above, you’ll also want to consider how the following possibilities might add to or enhance your business.

Newsletters and Updates

If your company regularly provides customers or associates with newsletters or updates about things that are happening within your organization or news that is related to your company, it is possible for an email outsourcing company to take care of this for you. With a given format and standardized content, you can pass off the task of major communications to your email outsourcer. You’ll serve your company by getting a project off someone else’s plate—and likely increase service to customers and associates by sending out newsletters that are timely and well designed. The right email company should be able to discuss the needs of your organization with you—then offer a package of services that suits your needs.

Its All About Support

In the end, what differentiates a good company from a bad company is the customer service and the level of customer support you receive. A great outsourced email system isn’t worth a dime if you receive no support and have to navigate through errors and problems on your own. You might as well have kept the email server in-house if that’s the case.

However, a good outsourced email company will consider your needs and do whatever they can to correct problems or even just explain the instructions they’ve given you in greater detail.

One major way most outsource companies can help you is by the use of support tickets. Let’s say you come across an issue while using administrator functions of the email system. If you cannot correct the issue, you would open a support ticket and explain your problem, and a representative from the company would get back to you in a reasonable amount of time. If they are a company that’s worth their price, they’ll get back to you within a few hours at the very latest.

If the problem occurs down at the user level, they too are encouraged to open a support ticket. However, they will more than likely be notified by email once the problem has been solved. If the company finds that the issue reaches deeper than the user level, the system administrator, which may very well be you, will be notified.

Regardless of the difficulty of the problem you may encounter, take solace in the fact that your outsourcing company is there to help you through it. And if they don’t help you, then it’s time to find a new company. After all, you are paying money for their services. It is only right that the level of service you receive is above what you experienced with an in-house email system.

Your Step-By-Step Transfer Guy

With everything situated and prepared for the big move, it is only natural to want to know or have some sort of game plan to get through the transfer. Every company has their own unique methods of transferring data and keeping things organized, but the following should suffice as a general outline of what to expect:

1. All data is transferred from the current server to the new server, if needed.

2. Mailboxes, usernames and passwords are created for all those wishing to have a unique user account. The number of mailboxes should match your subscription level with the outsource company.

3. Functionality of these mailboxes is tested via IP access.

4. Security is implemented to your specification.

5. Spam and content filters are placed and tested.

6. Specialized functions as well as routine procedures are implemented, such as a block list, a file-size limitation, back-up procedures and other functions.

7. Diagnostic tests are run to ensure the functions you’ve specified are in working order.

8. Once initiated, all current emails are redirected from your current server to the new server.

9. After a period of transfer time, all emails will go directly to the new server as the old server is taken down. This process can take up to two days to complete.

10. In ideal situations, all employees will be completely unaffected by the process taking place and functionality should not be compromised during the move.

11. You will be provided with administrator and user manuals to help you take control of the mail system. These manuals will help you change settings and such if and when you need to.

12. The company will help you sort through ways to contact them and how to best reach them for assistance.

13. Employees will be given detailed instructions on how to access their new mail accounts, though user actions usually do not require any change at all.

It sounds like a lot to digest, and it can be for those who are not acquainted with the more intricate workings of email. However, an outsource company takes care of practically everything for you. So as you look at this list of steps to take, don’t worry. All you would likely have to do is set up mailboxes for your employees. You can even let each employee set up his/her own. Not much is laid on your shoulders in this process and that’s the way it should be. After all, you are switching to an outsourced email system to try to increase your efficiency, right?

Moving Old Emails

This process can be either extremely easy or extremely difficult, depending on what your old mail server was like. If it is a fairly standard server, then the outsource company can use automated software to transfer old email messages and configurations to the new server. However, if your old email server was extremely outdated or contained something out of the ordinary, a more manual approach may be necessary. But again, all of this will be taken care of by the outsource company.

Route Filtering

This method of outsourcing is not quite as comprehensive as the previous one. All the external company does in this case is filter your email before routing it to your server. You will still need to have an in-house mail server for this system to work. However, this method eliminates the need to install virus protection, spam filters and content filters. This takes some of the burden off your technicians and servers, but you will still need to have on-site support to handle email network issues and user issues. By keeping a certain amount of expertise in-house and outsourcing just those parts that bring you the most difficulty, you can save time and money and streamline your communications considerably.

Managed Infrastructure

This option basically involves the outsourcing of your email in its entirety. The outsourcing company will manage every aspect of your email services including security, spam protection and backup systems. The company takes care of everything that an in-house administrator would have done.

You should be able to feel at ease knowing that this company is taking care of all of your email infrastructure needs. They’ll store all of your email as it is received; it will be removed from the server when it is downloaded by the user. This helps to prevent those pesky “lost” emails and unfiltered spam getting into your office. Plus, it saves you a lot of money as you don’t have to use valuable resources for storing emails and having your own bandwidth. Everything is taken care of at the outsourcing company’s offices. Everything is stored on their servers. Your only encounter with the email functions would be when you add a new user to the network or send and receive email yourself. All security issues are taken care of on the outsourced server as well, so you don’t have to worry about updating individual software on each computer—though you should do that anyway—for email security purposes.