Outsourcing your digital mailroom
The process for managing incoming business mail was clear – receive post in the mailroom, have a team open, sort and categorise all mail, then manually distribute it across your business to the relevant department or individual. Simple. Except it isn’t a simple process, especially when an organisation receives hundreds or thousands of pieces of inbound communication each day. Managing large volumes of mail is often an incredibly time consuming, expensive and inefficient process.
Luckily, the days of having to sift through, sort and deliver mountains of incoming paper mail can be left behind. The most efficient way to manage incoming mail is to go digital.
Dedicated hardware and technology for an in-house digital mailroom are great resources to have, but if there’s nobody in the mailroom to process all the mail – be that due to illness, extended office closures or business downsizing – there’s a problem.
Enter the ’Inbound Mail and Distribution Service’. Simply put, this is an outsourced digital mailroom facility, whereby all inbound post and documents are rerouted to or collected by an off-site scanning partner, who then processes it and distributes it digitally, straight to the relevant department or employee. No hardware or technology is required by a business on-site. The partner does all the work for you, saving your staff time in the process.
Here are a few benefits associated with an Inbound Mail and Distribution Service:
Unlike a paper document, which can only be in one place at a time, digital mail is perfect for the modern working environment. Documents are scanned by high resolution imaging hardware and processed by the scanning partner. The recipient can receive an instant notification of incoming mail, allowing them to access the document no matter where they are, or what time it is.
Opening and circulating mountains of paper documents each day consumes valuable staff time, not to mention the subsequent costs involved in running a team of mailroom workers to process everything. Converting mail into flexible digital files not only means improved time and cost management, it also negates the need for physical paper files to be stored, freeing up precious office space.
Having disparate sites and teams complicates the management of incoming mail. Via a PO Box, redirection or daily collections, a single inbound mail resource will streamline activities, in turn speeding up delivery and ensuring information is put in front of the right person as soon as possible.
A fully audited process involves incoming mail being sorted at a secure facility, before being supplied to you in your chosen format via SFTP or a cloud document management system. There’s no danger of a physical document being intercepted by the wrong person – only authorised members of staff are given access – while a clear audit trail shows who has accessed a document and when. Original documents can then be securely shredded, stored or returned by the scanning partner if required.
Once received by the scanning partner, all mail is opened, sorted, captured and verified, with software intelligently extracting any necessary data, before being digitally categorised and routed to the relevant department, team member, or into your organisation’s line of business systems.
Files can then be retrieved as and when required, through a simple digital search.
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