Universal Smart Cards Customer Story

Alasdair Nutt is Sales Manager at UK-based Universal Smart Cards. The firm is a market leader in the supply and implementation of smart cards for access control, PC security, identity, events, government, and leisure.

In his work, Alasdair sends and receives between 100 and 200 emails each week. Some of these contain important, valuable data – anything from a business lead’s details, to a quote, or the thread of a conversation with a client. He often needs to get hold of this information at a later time, sometimes years after the original correspondence.

Problem: retrieving valuable old emails

About 12 years ago, when Alasdair started with the firm, there was no proper archiving system for emails. They were just “saved into the sent box,” as he puts it. This went on for the next five years, with Alasdair keeping all old emails, and deleting nothing. When he needed to search for important information from his “archived” correspondence, “It was painstakingly hard to find any emails,” he says. “Sometimes, you could never find them. Outlook files were huge. It slowed everything down. It created masses of problems for me over five years.”

Solution: Cryoserver email archiving

Listening to Alasdair, you sense how relieved he was when Universal Smart Cards started using dedicated email archiving software. About seven years ago, the firm’s IT services provider, IT Managed, moved the business to Office/Microsoft 365 and deployed Cryoserver. IT Managed host and deliver their own Cryoserver Cloud environment to their customers.

Since then, our software has kept a copy of every email sent or received by the company. It stores emails compliantly and securely in an archive that works with Microsoft 365 but is independent of it. So Alasdair and his colleagues still have access to their emails even if there’s a Microsoft 365 outage.

We asked him how he’d found using Cryoserver over the last seven years.

“I embraced it immediately,” he says. Since copies of every email were archived, he could delete most of what he didn’t need right away from his Outlook. “I haven’t had a problem ever since.”

Cryoserver’s benefits are about much more than just freeing up his Outlook and archiving old emails effectively.

The sales manager’s everyday search tool

“I use Cryoserver more as a search engine,” he says. “I can find things from any time in the past, usually very, very quickly.

“I used it this morning to try and find my expenses from March. I use it to find quotes that have been given to me by suppliers - sometimes dim and distant quotes that I have given to customers.”

He also relies on it to track down details of business leads. He mentions how he tried using his employer’s CRM to retrieve an old supplier’s details. Unfortunately, the CRM system had changed twice since he and the supplier had last been in touch, and it couldn’t find the data. Then he searched via Cryoserver and found what he needed.

Settling a legal dispute

There was a time, Alasdair says, when Cryoserver helped resolve a disagreement that “could have gone potentially very badly.”

“We had a customer who owed us a lot of money. There were emails over two or three years going backwards and forwards about many things, and it could have nearly gone to court. It was at the eleventh hour that they decided to settle out of court with us, rather than us taking them to court.”

He says Cryoserver helped him find documents that supported his claims. “I knew Cryoserver could be used in a legal context. I actually got a large file that I handed over to the lawyers which identified who said what, when and why. When we gave them the emails in disclosure, it was quite clear what had been communicated.”

Helping Alasdair stay on top

Summing up his experience of our software, Alasdair says it does what we promise: “Cryoserver can find past information from very simple inputs in a fraction of the time of anything else I’ve seen – anything that you have sent or received or been copied into – and literally within milliseconds.”

Since we showed him how to use it, he hasn’t needed any support. “It is very simple to use.”

Benefits for your whole business

Whether you’re in sales, like Alasdair, or in marketing, IT, HR, finance, compliance or another role, Cryoserver can help you work more effectively and productively.

Find out more.