Businesses have been transformed forever since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, a McKinsey & Company report suggests. Many were pushed over the technology tipping point, a process that sped up digital transformations and the adoption of innovative solutions.
The digital mailroom is one such solution that’s more prominent than ever before.
You may think that corporate organizations have become entirely reliant on email communication but this isn’t the case. A lot of traditional mail is still playing a role in everyday processes. Documents like contracts, invoices, propositions, and strategic papers are still often being sent out in the form of traditional mail.
If your business is considering the introduction of a digital mailroom or you’ve just gotten one, there are strategic changes that will have to occur to back up the transformation. Here are some of the ways to make the most of this innovation.
Choose the Right Online Document Management System
The digital mailroom benefits have a number of important components.
Obviously, it starts with effective mail scanning. Once this process is completed, the digitized documents will have to go somewhere. For this purpose, you’ll need cloud-based document storage and a reliable document management platform.
Your document management software will play a tremendously important role in just about every process. This is why you need a solution that makes documents easy to index, classify and retrieve upon necessity.
Don’t hesitate to invest in a high-quality, scalable document management solution. In the absence of such a platform, handling digital files in a quick and efficient manner will become a difficult task.
Don’t Just Store Images, Manage Data
When paper-based documents get scanned, they will be uploaded online in the form of images.
This process, however, should not be the end point of your digital mailroom creation.
Images disable the retrieval of data and the effortless indexing of files. You cannot copy a portion of the text, search for it or use it within brand-new documents you’re creating.
This is the main reason why in-house mail scanning isn’t recommended. You’ll get your regular mail transformed to a digital format easily. If you cannot manage and extract data from these files, however, you’ll be missing a huge opportunity to simplify many processes.
Do partner up with a company that can turn your paper mail into usable files. Such opportunities exist and they’ll definitely maximize the usefulness of your digital mailroom.
Consider and Integrate Digital Mailroom Automation Opportunities
Digitization gives you the chance to automate many tedious tasks, thus helping team members focus on solely strategic tasks at hand.
When planning a digital mailroom, do strategize about the processes that could be automated.
The sorting and classification of digital mail are two such processes, especially if you’re using the right document management system.
The identification of different document varieties and the extraction of data from those could also be automated through the creation of custom workflows. Most document management systems have such capabilities. It’s simply a matter of getting properly trained and utilizing the available technology to the maximum.
Plan for Outgoing Mail and Non-Scannable Items
Even after the transformation is completed, chances are that a portion of your correspondence will remain in paper form.
Your strategy should account for such items and processes, as well as for the outgoing mail, you’ll still need to send out to clients, business partners, and other entities.
Some businesses will deal with non-scannable items that will still have to be maintained in the form of paper documentation. A dedicated team should be responsible for handling such documents and making sure the archive is properly integrated with the rest of the mailroom.
The same team could be responsible for handling outgoing mail. This is an especially good idea if you have lots of remote employees and only a small centralized team that operates from your office or headquarters.
What would be most important in that instance is integration and smooth cooperation between the teams. Decide on communication and interaction strategies that make sense and that aren’t going to contribute to operative burden or glitches.
Continue Expanding Your Digitization Efforts Beyond the Digital Mailroom
In the long run, your goal would be to increase your digitization efforts and encompass as much of your documentation as possible.
It’s possible to eliminate standard mail altogether but you’ll need to introduce changes in the way you communicate with third parties.
For some companies, the process is gradual. Others introduce a complete overhaul of their communication strategies. It’s up to you to figure out which approach would work best for your enterprise. Furthering your digitization efforts, however, will simplify many aspects of getting the job done.
A digital mailroom isn’t a revolutionary development – it’s been around for as long as scanning equipment has existed. Today, however, it can be integrated with highly innovative technologies to bring digital business to the next level. All it takes is a bit of strategic planning and personalization to make the most of the opportunity, increasing versatility and employee freedom along the way.