What actually arrives in the mailbox
Tenant requests (breakdowns, access, questions about service charges), supplier documents, insurance notifications, letters from authorities, internal reminders. Each type has a natural recipient and a different level of urgency.
The first step of a project is not choosing a model but measuring: how many emails per week, what breakdown by type, what average handling time, which recurring errors.
The four decisions of a routing system
Classify (what is this about?), extract (which asset, which unit, which deadline?), route (who handles it?), reply (what to say immediately?). A useful system must make these four decisions explicit and traceable.
Each decision carries a confidence score. Below a threshold, the email goes to human review rather than being routed incorrectly.
Where to place human control
On ambiguous categories, on any binding reply, on requests involving spending or access. The rest can be automated with an audit log.
Human review is not a temporary step: it is part of the design and feeds the system's improvement.
What to prepare
Access to the mailbox, a list of managers and their portfolio, an export of past tickets or requests, and one person on the client side who settles edge cases during testing.
Illustrative example of how the process can work. Volumes and gains depend on each organisation.
Illustrative example of how the process can work.