FranklinCovey Enhances Email Security and Efficiency with Abnormal

FranklinCovey has earned an international reputation for effective leadership and company culture training. For more than 35 years, their coaching has promoted “habits of effectiveness in every individual” and a “high-trust culture” to achieve key goals. The company also applies this approach to its own operations, supporting customers across 160 countries with resources in two dozen languages.

Graymail that made it past the company’s Microsoft 365 security was impacting efficiency—for the IT team and the company in general. The FranklinCovey security team also wanted a reliable way to prevent advanced credential phishing and vendor email compromise attacks from evading their existing security stack. FranklinCovey's key challenges were:

• Preventing advanced credential phishing attacks from reaching employee inboxes.
• Preventing vendor email compromise (VEC) attacks and detecting compromised vendor accounts.
• Improving productivity by accurately filtering out graymail and spam.

“Efficiency and automation are key. We wanted an adaptable, automated solution that no one has to babysit,” said Blaine Carter, Global CIO. Additionally, “Microsoft is very good at filtering threats with malicious elements, but we also needed an in-depth understanding of email intent.”

Abnormal Inbound Email Security uses advanced behavioral AI to baseline the normal behavior of every user in an organization and then detect deviations—including subtle shifts in tone, content, and wording—that can indicate a sophisticated attack.

Email Productivity extends behavioral AI to the message-sorting habits of each user to learn their preferences. Then, the solution automatically sorts unwanted graymail into a Promotions folder, freeing the IT team from tedious tasks related to managing rules and safelists.

Abuse Mailbox Automation and Account Takeover Protection use Abnormal behavioral AI to put investigation, remediation, and compromised-account lockouts on autopilot, so the IT team can enjoy more peace of mind and more time for other tasks.

Carter and his team liked the fact that Abnormal supports multiple languages—an asset for a company with global operations. The setup was easy, too.

“We were impressed with the fast implementation. Within four days, Abnormal identified a BEC email that made it past M365. That could have cost a lot of money,” said Carter.

Abnormal also helps FranklinCovey work more efficiently. Email Productivity filters out hundreds of thousands of graymail messages, so employees and VIPs save roughly 500 hours per month. Abnormal also saves Carter’s team time and stress.

“As a 24/7 workforce, we can’t always be available when a threat comes in. Autoremediation and especially automatic lockout when someone’s account is compromised are lifesavers for us. We can rest on the weekends and sleep at night, knowing that if something happens, Abnormal will prevent it from spreading.”

With Abnormal monitoring FranklinCovey’s email ecosystem across languages and time zones, the company has found an effective automated solution for protecting customer and company data, enhancing productivity, and increasing employee and VIP trust in the email system.

“Abnormal augments the benefits Microsoft provides to give us a true AI-enabled email solution,” Carter said.