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How to connect your email to your business processes to achieve unparalleled email automation.

Email has eclipsed the fax as a business communication tool and is replacing telephone calls in an ever-growing proportion. Email is generally directed to a person or an organization. Practically every company with a Web site generates email from its visitors, and in many cases the load is reaching overwhelming levels.

Processing of email messages directed at an organization or a department can be automated to various degrees. In fact, there are a number of software products in the market that do just that. Automated email processing has several benefits. Automated processing means email does not have to be manually read and the work associated with email need not be manually assigned. Acknowledgments and thank you responses, for example, can be automatically generated. A crushing email load can be reduced to a manageable level when automation helps accomplish even simple tasks.

Although existing email automation software products can increase efficiency, reduce cost and enhance customer satisfaction, virtually all of the commercial products are limited in at least one respect. They typically stop well short of being able to integrate with your organization’s business processes.

In reality, the immediate task associated with an incoming email message usually represents only the first in a series of tasks. When organizational email is received from a Web site, for example, a whole business process composed of multiple tasks typically arises. To achieve real automation of organizational email, the email automation product should be capable of integration with the business processes of your organization, not just focus on the tip of the iceberg.

This is where the TaskServer EMail Adapter (TEA) comes in. Although the concept behind TEA (pronounced TEE-ah) is simple, the result is very powerful. TEA and TaskServer™ architecture make sophisticated custom-processing of email possible without custom programming.

TEA continually monitors email accounts that you specify. When email arrives, TEA can execute a TaskServer™ Task Group that you’ve designed or specified. This tight integration with TaskServer Task Groups provides remarkably flexible automation and robustness with little effort. Without any programming, you’ll be able to link your email to business processes you specify.

Another very powerful application of TEA comes in e-commerce fulfillment. At many e-stores, when a customer checks out items in the shopping cart the order information is emailed to a fulfillment center or in-house fulfillment department. The TEA module can be used at the fulfillment group to retrieve email orders instantly as they arrive. Then the orders can be instantly connected to a TaskServer Task Group that automates all the downstream fulfillment processes.

Since you design the Task Group that TEA invokes, not only can it contain any tasks you wish a person to perform, it can also include tasks that invoke software Fulfillers. With a software Fulfiller, you could invoke a task that would analyze the content of an email message and conditionally initiate other tasks based on the content. For example, the software Fulfiller might scan for key words or phrases indicating a product problem and automatically route the message to a customer service representative as appropriate. Or, incoming messages that request product information could be automatically routed to the appropriate sales personnel. Such intelligent software Fulfillers can handle large volumes of work that would require untold hours of manual processing. Software Fulfiller objects can be developed for TaskServer™ yourself using Visual Basic or other development tools, or you could purchase software objects from third-party developers.

To learn more about TaskServer’s Business Process Automation (BPA) and automated e-commerce fulfillment features, just click on the highlighted links. For additional TaskServer™ information of any type including how to purchase the product, please email us at sales@taskserver.com or call our U.S. office at 603.881.9191 .