Handling The Volume?

[Jurisprude]

Handling the Volume

Who are the e-mails from? Mainly all from different people or repeaters as you mentioned (firing off 10 e-mails on their Blackberry without stopping to think)? If the latter, you could tell them that to best assist them, unless it's an emergency (and explain what constitutes an emergency from your perspective), it would be most effective to save up their inquiries or status reports to a daily (or less frequent if possible) correspondence.

If the e-mails are coming from all different sources, what about an immediate auto-reply saying "Thank you for your message/inquiry; you can typically expect a response in (X amount of time.)"

Hope that helps...

 

[spectecGTD]

email productivity practice

I don't know where I first saw this idea, but it is very useful if your people are not doing it already and if you have any input into their email practices. It can greatly enhance email productivity. I follow it with virtually every email I send and I constantly emphasize it with my correspondents;

The subject line should be a useful & informative summary of the body of the email.

My practice is to first write the email and then compose the subject line last. It's fascinating how many times the essence of the email can be summarized in the subject line, and even how often the subject line can BE the message.

People with whom I regulary correspond know that I respond to appropriately-titled emails faster. They also know the fastest route to the bottom of my list is to send an emial with no subject line, one that simply says "RE:", or even one that says "URGENT" (unless it also describes what it is that's so darn urgent).

 

[Brent]

...we've become victims of our own success. Since we've been providing good services to the field, we're now getting a lot more requests, but not more resources to respond to them.

How good is your company at denying requests?

It looks like your company may be accepting more work than you can handle. Your company may be moving into the stage where you can cherry-pick only the work that appeals to you.

I'm still looking for tips for handling the volume of e-mail. Thanks for any input.

A suggestion: Every time you process your inbox, move the contents of your inbox to an empty folder, and then process only the e-mails in that folder. Don't worry about the e-mails that are now coming in to your inbox; you'll get to them when next you have a window of time to process e-mails.

This way, you will only have a single, defined number of e-mails to process at a time.

I did this at work for a time, and initially colleagues would approach me asking, "Did you see my e-mail?" I'd reply, "No, I haven't checked my e-mail in a little while," and they would fill me in on the details. After a few weeks, they stopped doing this, and they no longer expect me to reply to e-mails immediately.

 

[jpm]

Thanks for the tips

I appreciate the tips from my update. I've already created a "Process" folder under my inbox to start processing a fixed block of e-mails. I think that will help tremendously. I've been working on my team to focus on using subject lines and it's a process. (At least now they almost always include a subject line).

I'm going to also start blocking e-mail into chunks from those people who can't seem to get a complete thought in a single e-mail.

Most of the e-mail is coming from internal customers who are not repeat customers. The question is whether or not the majority of the work we are doing is going to end in sales. (Our work product is typically middle of the sales process which can run 6 months to a year). We're in the process now of determining how effective we've been over the last six months...

I don't think we'll have the luxury of cherry picking the work we want to do any time in the near future.

Thanks to everybody for your thoughts and help.

 

[Brent]

Good luck. Overwhelm is a decidedly unpleasant state.

 

[kewms]

Two adages that may or may not apply, but that I've found helpful.

First, if you have more work than you can handle, raise your rates. I learned this in connection with self-employment, but it's equally true for larger organizations. You may not want to turn customers away, but raising your rates can got your workload under control without hurting your bottom line.

Second, if your proposal acceptance rate is better than 80%, you aren't stretching enough. If it's worse than 65% or so, you aren't qualifying your leads carefully enough. Don't burn yourself out chasing projects that you aren't going to get.

Katherine