The retail industry has been transformed by technology in the form of email. And in every place that email has made positive change, its effectiveness and security remain essential to your continued success.

Email and Retail: Impact on Crucial Areas

• Customer service:  The most visible and the most valuable improvements in customer service are enabled by email. Email plays a critical role in helping retailers with multiple locations, diverse sales channels and complex distribution and partner networks communicate faster and more accurately with each other and their customers.
• Transaction management: Retailers now use email routinely to process millions of transactions a day—at a fraction of traditional costs and in a fraction of the time. With email, retailers not only do business more efficiently and cost effectively, but also more responsively.
• Infrastructure support: No modern industry is complete without email and the retail industry is no exception. Email has become a mission-critical component for every individual and group in the organization—from those on the front lines with customers to those who oversee the daily management of business operations.

Email enhances every facet of the retail industry in the 21st century. But if left unguarded from spam, virus, and phishing, email can also interfere—with devastating effect—with retail’s primary mission: Providing customers with products they want at prices they’ll pay.

Why can’t retailers afford to ignore email threats?
Spam, virus, phishing, fraud. Every one of these email threats—in both blended and separate forms—has the potential to devastate networks, frustrate your employees and compromise customer satisfaction.

Additionally, IT managers of retail organizations face specific challenges when fighting email threats:

• Managing users of different skills and email preferences in geographically diverse locations that grow in number as their organizations grow.

• Maintaining the performance of email servers in remote locations with diverse configurations from an office sometimes hundreds of miles away.

• Keeping the entire organization and its email safe, up and running to ensure employee, customer and partner communications whenever and wherever they are needed. 

But managing email is not just a tactical concern. There are also strategic implications to keeping email effective and productive that the retail IT manager must address:

• Controlling communication cost. Email communication saves time and money; no retail organization can afford to lose it.

• Identifying a solution that scales with ever increasing email volume and message size. Email is used on a 24/7 basis to transfer mission-critical and customer-critical information; it can’t be interrupted or limited.

• Establishing email as a valuable part of providing superior customer service. Email’s capabilities and potential make it a necessary part of customer service for the modern retailer; retail IT managers must seek ways to enhance its value while ensuring its security.

These demands on retail IT executives and their managers prove that technology plays a critical role in the retail business model—and the challenges facing retailers making technology decisions. 

According to eWEEK, “…retail IT execs have seen more technology changes in the last two years than they have seen in the last 15 or more years… But even the ‘strongly proven’ technologies have the potential to be goldmines or disasters, depending on the wisdom of the IT crystal ball… That's the problem with retail technology. You absolutely cannot rely heavily on past behavior to project future needs. In military and political circles, that thinking is called ‘gearing up to win the last battle instead of the next one.’”

“That is a very tall order. Many of these systems take so long to deploy—from concept to full customer use—that retail IT execs must project consumer and B2B needs four or five years out. But consumers and business execs are far too fickle for that. Even if IT execs could read the minds of every current and future prospect, that would still be only half the battle because most customers don't truly know what they want today and they certainly have no clue what they are going to want five years in the future.”
eWEEK
September 2004

What does MailFrontier offer the savvy retailer for email management?
MailFrontier provides you risk-free comprehensive inbound email protection that blocks today’s threats of spam, virus, and phishing and new threats as they emerge. With these threats stopped at the network gateway, you can prevent network service interruption and see extended processing power and life out of your existing system configurations

MailFrontier delivers retail organizations three key immediate benefits:

• Reduced management time and cost
  We’ll end the hours you spend dealing with keyword lists and content filters. We’ll stop the phone calls from frustrated users looking for “lost” emails. MailFrontier knows the way to satisfy every one of your network users, groups, and administrators with one email security solution. And in five steps and a handful of mouse clicks, you can too.

• 98 percent effectiveness
  The MailFrontier Anti-Spam, Anti-Virus and Anti-Fraud modules combine to offer an integrated, real-time, multi-technique approach to email security. If you’re at the mercy of a series of point solutions that seem to have an arbitrary concept of “good enough,” MailFrontier offers one solution that works against every threat, on every email, every time. 

• Improved return on investment
  As your organization grows, email volume increases. By keeping unwanted email out of your network altogether, you stop wasting valuable processing power on email that threatens your productivity and security. The result is longer life and use of your current IT investment—without significant additional cost.

MailFrontier retail customers keep their email productive and reduce email management time and burden with our entire line of MailFrontier Gateway™ products. The MailFrontier solution is implemented at retailers of every size and protects email systems with varying system configurations. From the moment of deployment, MailFrontier is immediately at work using multi-technique anti-spam analysis, time zero virus protection and market-leading fraud detection. MailFrontier ensures that retail organizations can keep their email productive, reduce email management time and burden and refocus resources on improving business processes, enhancing customer service and ensuring efficient business operations.