Newbie integration question & email management

Copper Contributor

Hello, everyone-

 

I am new to the MSFT Tech community, and this is my first post. I work in my family's insurance agency, and we have about 20 employees. Our industry is very specialized, and most of our team's work is done in a management system that's designed specifically for insurance agencies.

 

Our team is not used to working in a collaborative way like Planner, Tasks, and Flow facilitate. The average age of our employees is about 50, so they have been used to working veery differently their whole career. However, we are encountering some serious process, workflow, and technology issues that are resulting in lots of overtime, a backlog of uncompleted tasks, and an inability to get ahead. 

 

One of their biggest complaints is: I have so many emails and voicemails that I have to respond to for my customers. Can these tools be used to manage email? 

 

Thanks for any help or perspective you can provide.

 

-Katlady

2 Replies

@katlady interesting to know your case. Planner will help you to get this done. The advantage of Planner is the collaboration. Each team member will know the progress of the task and can help others and track it. 

You need to use add-ins to convert email to planner task. Create separate buckets for the types of emails and convert the emails to task to those buckets accordingly. Here is my blog which helps you on this.

https://www.jijitechnologies.com/blogs/how-to-integrate-microsoft-planner-with-outlook

Hi @katlady,

I've spent my life as a consultant, helping organisations with technology.  The one thing I have learned is that tools don't solve problems, people do, but often, organisations think that introducing a "collaboration" tool is sufficient to solve a problem, it isn't!  Your question is "can these tools be used to manage email" - this is too ambiguous for me.   If you need to manage email and the volume of email, then spend some time learning about rules, categories, flags and views in Outlook.   If on the other hand, your staff are emailing intra company to follow and collaborate on a task, then Planner would be a good place to start.  

 

As for voicemails, they happen because people don't answer phones, again, you've got to ask why that is.  If the VM is intra company, and the message is about a task, then this might be better on planner.  

 

Bottom line, I would do some further digging re the problem before jumping into a soln.