3 essential things you never thought your emails could reveal

A picture paints a thousand words - this also holds true in the business world. For instance many of us convert spreadsheets with what appears to look like a meaningless stream of numbers, into charts and graphs. This not only helps uncover key trends but adds value to the information. 
The above is just a simple example but with the implosion of information in today’s digital era, we need help in seeing the wood for the trees – a way to mine through what is a lot of unstructured information to unearth the true meaning or context in a clear, logical manner and understand its actual value.

Take your firm’s email exchange server for example. It is the leading business communications platform where hundreds if not thousands of emails are exchanged between employees and clients daily. 
How does such amount of information reflect your activity? How can it help your business? If you look at the frequency of exchanges with a customer for example, it shows the strength of the relationship. If you look at the flow of the internal/external email communications, it will reveal who your employees are communicating to – a client? a competitor? the press...? 

"Messaging Intelligence" technologies are key to unlocking this hidden information. These technologies analyse and monitor your firm’s email correspondences without breaching privacy. It then transforms this into a graphical map to portray an overview of the organisation’s overall communications. What does this mean for your firm? 


Your firm’s key clients
By analysing and mapping the flow of email exchanges between the fee earner and all external entities, it can highlight all the clients that your employees are in contact with. As a fee earner, you can keep track of your own exchange history, first showing who you made contact with, then how recently and how often. In addition, you can also view who else in the firm was in contact with the client… 
Secondly, should a lawyer leave, it can be a valuable tool for enhancing the handover process as it provides management with the assurance that all key relations have been identified and transferred.
Drilling down even further, it helps determines if any other employees in your firm are in contact with the same client. In this way firms can ensure that client relationships are fostered and clients are retained, particularly vital in situations where a fee earner is leaving the firm.


The strength of client relationships 
Relationships are built over time. It is essential to remain in your target’s mind. Analysing the frequency, location, age and subject of inbound and outbound email communications shows the strength of relationships between employees and clients. This helps firms distinguish between their strongest client relationships and those that require more attention.
By gaining an understanding of client relationships, business development and marketing teams can use this information to engage with clients and prospects. They can optimise campaigns accordingly with targeted messages to help build and fortify relationships. 


Corporate breaches – leakages of sensitive data, non-compliance...

With the large volumes of emails channeling through the organisation daily, identifying risks such as conflicts of interest, leakage of intellectual property to competitors, non-compliance or cases of harassment can be extremely difficult. 
By monitoring email correspondences, messaging history, associations, patterns and behaviours that are of concern can be identified. Immediate action can then be taken before the threat becomes serious. For example if a competitor’s domain name is prevalent during an analysis, this can be investigated further to better understand the context of the communication and whether this is in compliance with corporate policies.

By narrowing down lines of communications, it also makes in-house investigations manageable in terms of time and costs. It also enhances a firm’s duty of care to their clients while protecting its intellectual property.  As these technologies only analyse the email subject lines, it ensures that employee privacy is not breached.



A vast amount of vital information can be uncovered through the analysis of a firm’s email communications. The use of messaging intelligence solutions permits firms to better understand client relationships and build upon them for continued business growth. More importantly it protects them from reputational damage by reducing the risk of sensitive information being compromised. As the single most important tool for business communications, the email platform offers a rich source of information that firms can leverage and can no longer afford to ignore.  

Nila Hirani [   ]

Nikec Solutions [ www.nikecsolutions.com ]

TrustView unlocks and visually presents the value in email correspondences between staff or with external entities. This solution retrieves contextual information from the e-mail exchanges of a staff member, a department, the entire organisation or, under a different perspective, towards external parties (prospects, clients, competitors, partners...).  
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