smallbusiness.co.uk: Helping your business think big

Over two thirds of UK businesses now rely on email to retain vital customer information, according a recent survey of UK IT professionals conducted at the Inbox Outbox event in London.

The report, conducted by Cobweb Solutions, also found that 77 per cent of respondents felt customer information was being locked away in mailboxes, reducing its value and putting the company at a severe disadvantage.

Michael Frisby, Business Development Director at Cobweb Solutions, points out that ‘email is not designed as a storage or effective CRM solution. Nonetheless our dependence on it as a business tool has led to huge amounts of critical information becoming inaccessible. Businesses depend on customer data to provide the best possible service and cannot fully utilise this information if it is locked away.’

This puts companies at risk of losing key customer contact details should an email system fail, which, in turn, would jeopardise customer communications and relationships. With half the respondents struggling with escalating email volumes and 26 per cent sinking under a deluge of viruses and spam, the chances of this happening are relatively high.

Storing high volumes of information ‘is adding to the pressure on servers and mail boxes that are already straining at the seams,’ adds Frisby. ‘Ensuring that email data is backed up in the event of a problem is clearly crucial.’

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