A shared mailbox that sorts itself
Everything lands at info@: orders, invoices, questions, complaints and advertising. Someone reads all of it in order to divide it up. That reading-in-order-to-divide is the work that disappears.
How it works today
Two or three people look in the same mailbox. One picks up what they recognise, another leaves what they do not understand. What is left over is exactly the difficult part, and that sits longest.
There is no way to see what has been picked up and what has not, other than reading everything again. When it gets busy something goes wrong, and it is usually the customer who had already called twice.
- A general mailbox with more than fifty messages a day
- Several people looking in it at the same time
- Messages sometimes sitting for a day because everyone assumed someone else was on it
- Recognisable categories of post: orders, invoices, requests, questions
What happens, step by step
- 1Collect
Messages are read from the mailbox, including attachments and the history of earlier messages from the same sender.
- 2Match the sender
The sender is matched to an existing customer, supplier or applicant. Unknown senders stay unknown, and that is an outcome rather than a failure.
- 3Determine the type
Order, invoice, quote request, question, complaint or advertising — with a confidence score, not a guess.
- 4Judge urgency
Tone, repetition and references to earlier contact decide whether something gets priority. A third message about the same thing weighs more than a first.
- 5Route
The message goes to the right person, the right folder, or straight into another process — an order into order intake, an invoice into the payables flow.
- 6Keep doubt separate
Anything that cannot be placed with certainty goes into one list where someone handles it. That choice is remembered for next time.
Where it goes wrong when it is built too simply
These are the questions we ask in the quick scan. If a supplier does not ask them, they surface later anyway — usually once there is already an invoice.
- An order and a complaint in the same message, from the same customer.
- A reply in a long thread where the subject has already changed three times.
- An automated message from a portal that looks like personal post.
- A customer emailing from a private address and therefore not matchable.
- Advertising laid out as a quote request, with a real phone number underneath.
- An urgent message written so politely that nothing about it reads as urgent.
What it delivers
The mailbox stops being a shared responsibility that is therefore nobody's. What is routed is routed; what is doubtful is in one place with a name against it.
The gain is rarely in the reading itself but in what no longer sits waiting. A message that reaches the right person the same morning does not become a phone call three days later.
This is the smallest of our automations and often the first one. It is also the one where the exceptions list matters most: it is what keeps the system honest about what it does not know.
Build: €995 – €1,750
Category: Small automation
Build time: 12 to 22 hours
Lead time: 1 to 2 weeks
Maintenance: Monitor, €95 per month
A range, not a quote. What it becomes for you follows from the Automation Check. All prices →
See all prices →Start with one process
Tell us which work gets retyped most often at your company. If automating it turns out to be a bad idea, you will hear that in the first conversation — before there is an invoice.
The first conversation is free and without obligation. Want it substantiated? The Automation Check is €295 — deducted if you have us build within 30 days.