Email filtering solutions protect many businesses from inappropriate and damaging email content. Dicontas enhances this protection with a unique solution to reduce annual staff administration costs by 40-80% for companies using an email filtering system, appliance or managed service.
If you are an Email Administrator or Compliance Officer, then please visit the Dicontas - Email Filtering Services website for more benefits on this unique value-added service for any email filtering or email monitoring system.
Recent studies indicate that when customers or potential customers contact an online organisation, 80% prefer communicating by email over phone and over 50% will not do business with a company if they do not receive an adequate response to their email within 24 hours. The average response time to a customer email inquiry is 72 hours.
Most online organisations communicate regularly with customers and clients by email, but few provide a level of email customer service that satisfies their customers. While email service standards are low, the benefits of communicating via email are palpable:
- Cost - an email conversation generally costs 75% less than a phone conversation.
- Time - the time it takes to respond to an email is significantly less than a phone call. Email also allows both the customer and your company representative to multi-task, responding to email messages while attending to other matters.
- History - email allows for the easy tracking and retrieval of email conversations, which ensures accountability and allows for organisational benefits derived from the sharing of customer history and knowledge.
Source: deerfield.com (providers of email management systems)
An online Image Filtering & Assessment Costing Tool has been created to estimate the volume, cost and staff resources required in the assessment and processing of business emails (with suspicious image attachments) that have been stopped when using a corporate email ‘image-analysis / porn’ filtering system.
The on-line tool can be accessed from this page: Image Filtering & Assessment Costing Tool
The purposes of this tool is to allow business management to calculate the estimated volume of suspicious email messages that will be:
- stopped by your ‘image-analysis / porn’ filter system as it may contain suspect pornographic images
- redirected to an human ‘assessor’ to manually review the contents of these suspicious email messages
- assessed to be a true positive (it does have pornographic content) or a false positive (it does not contain any inappropriate content)
…and to estimate the staff time needed:
- for the nominated ‘Email Assessor’ to assess, review and process emails with suspicious content
- for Human Resources to investigate and document the evidence required to process a formal disciplinary case - where an email incident contain pornographic content has been raised
- for an IT System Administrator to investigate, to search for computer evidence, and to take all the relevant backups, and to produce the relevant documentation to support these formal disciplinary proceedings
The tool will report the estimated annual costs to process suspicious email message image attachments internally (in-house) and then use these annual cost to calculate the potential annual savings your organisation can make by outsourcing the processing and management of this suspicious email content to Dicontas.
This blog site has been created to discuss the use of email monitoring and email filtering in the workplace.
I would like to hear your personal or professional views on the monitoring of email communications when adopted within an organisation.
This will be an open discussion to try to get different views from employees, administrators, middle management and company directors.
If you can touch on issues such as:
- How monitoring may affect staff morale and performance?
- Your rights to personal communications (maintaining your rights to privacy within the workplace, aka, the US/EU law on maintaining your rights to private life)
- When should email monitoring be adopted within an organisation?
- What is good about email monitoring, and in what circumstances?
- What is bad about email monitoring, and how can it be implemented better?
- Examples in the use of over-invasive email monitoring methods
- Do you agree or disagree with the guidelines and national regulations governing the monitoring of emails within the workplace?
- What are the alternatives to email monitoring (e.g. user education, better policy setting)
You can add any other relevant topics/points into the discussion.
If you wish to have your say then feel free to add your comments to this blog post. I would love to hear your view on this topic.
Please do not list any company, vendor or product names (or other identifiable information). If you do so, then your comments will be deleted and your opinions will not be read.
Written on 03 October 2006
by Dicontas Blog Admin under
Email Monitoring, Stories, Surveys
with
Tagged with business_email, business_operations, email_communications, email_filtering, email_management, email_monitoring, employee_productivity, ethics, legal_compliance, management, policy, privacy, staff_monitoring, staff_morale, staff_performance, training, user_education
The introduction of email has brought many benefits to organisations. One main benefit is having the capability to monitor email use by capturing communication metrics through which companies can then act in producing usage policies and provide education to try and reduce wasted resources and improve employee productivity. However, email monitoring also has complex ramifications on the organisation and on its workforce in terms of maintaining a balance between the protection of the employer and for its employees.
In other words, getting the right balance between allowing the organisation to continue business operations and not upsetting staff by invading their privacy rights or by using over-invasive monitoring methods that may affect staff morale and performance. Careful consideration and planning by both management and staff representatives is needed to evolve corporate policies to maintain this correct balance.
Written on 24 September 2006
by Dicontas Blog Admin under
Email Compliance
with
Tagged with business_operations, communication_metrics, compliance, corporate_governance, corporate_policies, email_management, email_monitoring, employee_productivity, ethics, privacy, staff_morale