Productivity Boosting with Email Thread Summarization
Email thread summarization
The tedious task of replying to a backlog of email messages is not strange to many salespeople. Imagine the difficulty of having to sift through constantly overflowing emails daily because they’re part of your work requirements.
It becomes a tough chore, especially when you know that sifting and reading through each email’s entire contents make up a large part of the decision-making process of processing and dispatching customer’s orders.
This only heightens your anxiety and puts you through more stress, especially when you have limited time to read through all of these emails from leads, customers, and co-workers.
As a salesperson, this scenario is very familiar, as it is what you do every time. Therefore, as a solution to reduce time spent sifting through the entire contents of emails, email thread summarization comes in handy.
Email thread summarization works by generating a test summary of an email.
This is done by highlighting the essential text in the thread. This summarizes text that is transferred to the reader: the salesperson–using an interface that allows the reader to grasp the thread’s entire context and content at a glance.
How the email thread summarization is done
Generally, there are two ways in which email thread summarization is done. They are:
- extraction-based summarization.
In extraction-based summarization, the email content is extracted so that the removed content is not altered in any way. It still maintains its original form as present in the email document.
Some examples of this extracted content include key sentences or key phrases that can identify the general text idea.
If what is being extracted is text-based, the extraction process is similar to skimming; you merely read the headings and the introductory and concluding paragraphs of a document searching for the general idea before you read the entire text in search of further details.
An extraction-based summarization of your email could include for example, after an outreach campaign, key phrases or text from the lead interaction, questions being asked, online meeting date and who should be included.
For interaction with an existing customer, we can examine quickly a summary of an email thread support to have a starting point of the discussion.
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Abstraction-based summarization.
Abstraction-based summarization ensures that the extracted contents of the email are altered.
Certain words are changed, and certain expressions are re-written so that you create a summary that is closer to what might have been done by a human being.
This kind of summarization offers more details, which is why it is more demanding and challenging. It requires knowledge of the language and understanding of the niche and field from which the email document was sent.
There is another kind of summarization, which is the aided summarization.
This relies on summarizing email content using both software and human input.
The machine or software highlights the documents that are to be included for summarization. Simultaneously, the humans process the output of the software just in the same way you edit the results when you use Google Translate to translate your words from one language to another.
Benefits of email thread summarization
Now that we have an understating how email thread summarization is done will discuss below a few use cases and the benefits of email thread summarization.
- Suppose that you receive a lot of orders via emails several times daily. You may not be able to patiently read through all of these emails and process all the others without burning out, especially if you are working alone. Email summarization can come to the rescue.
- A customer is reaching out and has a long email thread conversation with the Marketing Sales Rep before being passed to the Account Executive for closing.
- Many of your co-workers are engaged in a long important thread. You don’t have the time to read the whole thread, therefore you reach to the thread summarization button to receive a trim down version and still be on top of the discussion.
- Therefore, once you grasp the concept of email thread summarization, the main benefit of thread summarization should be seen in increased productivity level.
Conclusion
This is why summarizing email content to reveal essential texts and phrases is a necessity. It helps you concentrate on what is more important, and it also helps you become more productive and more efficient at your job as the time you spend reading through emails is converted into processing and sending all the others as soon as they come in.