By Principal Farica Chang
It’s the small things that add together to make a big difference. This holds true for our client in the property management industry, who approached us to get help with standardizing their email management.
Email accounts and signatures are like online calling cards, except these digital ones can make an especially big impact on your business in unexpected ways. Put it this way: What if a relative traveling abroad mailed you a postcard from your hometown? A bit confusing, and maybe even cause for concern, but when discrepancies like this happen in business communications, a lot more is at stake!
Our client saw that their hundreds of non-standardized emails (multiple domains, different formats like first initial/last name, full names, first name only, etc.) were undermining trust in their clients, causing confusion for internal and external communications, and even creating vulnerabilities for cybercriminals to exploit. Our team jumped at the chance to help our growing client overcome these challenges. Read on to see how we did it.
(As always, our clients’ security remains paramount. That’s why we don’t disclose company names and personal information to the public to prevent targeted phishing attacks.)
The Challenge: Compromised Customer Experiences and Cybersecurity
With a growing team serving a range of different customers, our client started to see how their non-standardized email systems were hurting the business, customer experiences, and their cybersecurity posture. The lack of standardization of user accounts, email signatures, and setup processes presented several problems:
- It created security risks as cyber-attackers could much more easily impersonate a member of the team without discrepancies being noticed.
- It made it harder to tell spam and phishing emails apart from actual user accounts.
- Without proper user setup conventions, it was hard to create and manage standardized accounts, as multiple managers were setting them up.
- It was undermining the brand and customer experience of the business.
These challenges made it harder for our client to ensure their security, nurture their brand, and create a consistent customer experience. Recognizing these challenges, we rolled up our sleeves to help our client transform the situation.
The Solution: Streamlined Email Management, Disruption-Free
Addressing these issues was a complex task, so we did our homework. We started by mapping all the types of email accounts, dynamic rules, delegation, forwarding rules, and other dependencies present in our client’s multiple email systems. By mapping the technical territory, we were able to ensure the standardization would be a smooth and disruption-free process.
With this understanding, we updated each of these elements to ensure that the standardization would apply for all accounts without causing unexpected issues for our client’s team. We took care to ensure that the wider authentication dependencies between different applications would also not be compromised by the project.
To safeguard continuity and ensure the implementation was a smooth and successful one, we acted in planned phases, which allowed us to respond quickly to issues and feedback from the team across the process. Communication was key. We kept our client’s team informed and hosted regular communications calls to help them smoothly adapt to the changes.
Following each implementation phase, we checked in with our client to make sure that no issues had emerged and that everything was working as it should.
The Outcomes: Streamlined, Secure, and Customer-Friendly Emailing
Creating a consistent and professional format for emails and user account setup enabled our client to overcome their challenges. The security of their email and its role in ensuring regulatory compliance was markedly improved. Standardized naming conventions and signatures now make it easier to tell legitimate and illegitimate emails apart.
The standardization also minimized confusion across both internal and client-facing communications. The business is now able to present a professional and consistent brand image, enhancing the customer experience and empowering trust. The standardization also means that management now loses less time and focus on creating and managing user accounts because the new standards now make setting up users much more scalable.
As our client graciously shared with us at the conclusion of the project: “This was a complex undertaking but was executed smoothly by Anderson Technologies’ technical experts.”
Another Milestone to Better Business With IT
Our satisfaction comes from the results this email standardization project has created for our client, knowing that their work and security are complemented by systems that are streamlined and simple to use.
Have an IT challenge on your hands? We can help! It all starts with a conversation. The experience of working with Anderson Technologies is best put by one of our valued clients, A.M:
“We feel like the luckiest clients in the world to have the technology back-up that we have with Anderson Technologies. We get so much more for our money—more knowledge and a broader spectrum of expertise than we could ever get if we were to hire just one IT employee. Anderson Technologies was able to find us a much less expensive option that still achieved what we need. They just want to serve the client… they are such buzz words, but it’s true. You’re getting dependable service from people that actually care… websites, networks, databases, they can do it all!”
If you need a hand from a caring team you can rely on, we’d love to hear from you. Connect with us today to start your journey to creating a better business with the help of technology.
