In the wake of the pandemic, businesses are re-thinking legacy ways of working. Processes that are fixed, inefficient and inflexible are living on borrowed time. Certainly, the traditional on-site physical mailroom is fast looking like an outdated method of dealing with an ongoing challenge – that of handling incoming communication volume and ensuring that business critical data reaches the right people fast.
The digital mailroom is driving transformations that are turning this challenge into competitive edge. So - what are the competitive advantages of the digital mailroom approach? Here are six clear wins.
On-site mailrooms are unwieldy and expensive, requiring dedicated space that few other business functions demand. What’s more, the impact of Covid has served to accelerate strategic thinking around remote working and how existing workspace is used. Businesses need solutions that will digitise, classify and route incoming documents to decision-makers wherever they might be based. That’s the digital mailroom.
Traditional mailrooms still rely heavily on manual input. On a daily basis, this takes valuable employee hours away from core business activities. The digital mailroom automates these manual processes, freeing colleagues to get back to key front-line activities and driving greater cost and process efficiency.
In document intensive sectors such as insurance or banking it is not uncommon for documents to have up to a dozen touchpoints before a process is completed. Each touchpoint is a potential for delay, which can lead to frustration for the end customer. The digital mailroom uses machine learning and intelligent automation to extract, verify and integrate data into business workflows, streamlining internal decision-making and expediting everyday business actions.
The number of channels through which customers can now communicate results in a multitude of interactions arriving at different touchpoints, in different formats, at any time of the day or night. Managing this mix efficiently and securely is a critical challenge for businesses. The digital mailroom captures data from every channel, presenting unified information to decision-makers. The result is a more holistic picture of each customer’s interactions which helps to inform quicker, more tailored customer service.
Complying with regulatory requirements is an ongoing challenge – businesses must stay on top of every amendment to rules and regulations. The digital mailroom provides a robust and comprehensive audit trail from receipt to secure archive. Authorised stakeholders have access to this secure archive at any time, from any location.
Processing inbound payments and cheques is time-consuming and labour intensive. Failing to do so in a timely fashion can lead to organisations missing out on cash and can cause friction with customers. The digital mailroom can automate tasks such as reconciling incoming payments and allocating funds to particular accounts, improving process security and driving efficiency.
Ultimately, by adding automation and intelligence to the processing of inbound communications, the digital mailroom is delivering advantages that play across an organisation as a whole. Businesses taking this strategic route today are quickly gaining ground on competitors staying faithful to inflexible legacy processes.
