In today’s modern office environment, the one thing that every business has to deal with is the onslaught of traditional mail and electronic correspondence. Whether you are a law office or a small e-commerce store, the bombardment of information and mail is something we all have to manage. So, the solution is quite simple, welcome to the digital mailroom.
Definition of the Digital Mailroom
First, let’s define what the digital mailroom is and then we can dive into how it works. A digital or virtual mailroom is an outsourcing service specializing in handling, formatting, and sorting your digital and physical mail. Depending on the mailroom service you need, these professional companies can prioritize, expedite, and filter your mail with military-like precision.
What are digital mailroom outsourcing services?
Digital mailroom outsourcing services allow you to free up much needed time or resources from mind-numbing work. With an automated digital mailroom, you can enjoy all the benefits of an organized mailroom without having to pay for a full-time employee. You can split outsourcing services into two tranches: the first is physical, and the second is digital.
On the physical side, when you choose to outsource, here is the typical setup. Your physical mail will be redirected to a dedicated P.O. box that is monitored. The solution will actively monitor and brings the mail to a secure document scanning facility for processing at regular intervals. For instance, you can sort once a day, twice a day, or even once a week. The correspondence is then opened, prepped, scanned, indexed, and saved to pre-set standards. Once these steps are complete, you have the option to either send and save the digital files in your line of business software or send them as PDFs for manual processing by a staff member.
What this looks like in action is as follows:
- A water bill comes into the office.
- Automatically opens, preps, scans, and meticulously indexes your mail for the accounts receivable team.
- Once the scanning process is complete, the bill is automatically uploaded to the accounting software, triggering an immediate notification to the accounts department. Alternatively, the bill can be sent as a PDF to a designated mailbox or a specific individual, allowing for manual sorting and payment.
On the digital side, it works pretty similarly to the physical side. Incoming emails are received at a dedicated inbox that is monitored. Attachments or embedded documents are stripped from the email and converted to the correct file type for processing. The captured data is then organized and sent to the appropriate team.
How does a virtual mailroom work?
The beauty of a virtual mailroom is that it is a fully customizable solution that can fit your office’s needs. Let’s use two examples to showcase how a virtual mailroom could work.
First, let’s take a law office that specializes in real estate law. The office is quite busy and generally provides clients with closing packages and legal advice around residential and commercial real estate deals. A client has just closed on a home, and their agent is sending in the final details of the purchase agreement, while their mortgage broker is sending in the necessary documents on his side as well. With a digital mailroom, the software will sort the files, organize them how the lead council will need it and have the entire file ready for when council meets with the client to sign the paperwork—no more searching for lost attachments or dealing with non-formatted PDF’s. With a virtual mailroom, everything is formatted, organized and ready to go.
On the other hand, digital mailroom automation can be a valuable tool if you run a small design company. The digital mailroom can filter through leads versus spam and ensure that you have access to designs, ideas, or inspirations with ease. Instead of finding multiple attachments within an email chain, all pertinent files are organized and easy to access with a digital mailroom. Simply put, a digital mailroom makes things easier for your company to deliver top-notch projects without wasting time with a messy inbox.
What are the benefits of a digital mailroom?
Improved customer service
Whether you are a large firm, or a smaller tech company, a digital mailroom can provide a better customer experience via automated communications and faster processing of documents. The solution can notify customers of the receipt of their documents through an automated email, ensuring timely delivery to the appropriate person.
Reduced manual data entry
A digital mailroom can free up employees to focus on other jobs or projects within the company through automation processes. A digital mailroom can scrape relevant information and provide the data and documents that decision-makers will need to move a project, file, or decision forward.
Greater Policy Compliance
There is a risk that human error will affect your business lines when manually sorting documents. A digital mailroom mitigates this risk and provides your company with a clear audit trail for the lifecycle of each document.
Main steps to implement digital mailroom
First and foremost, you need to figure out what kind of digital mailroom you want to set up. Are you looking for a full mailroom management automation where physical mail is sorted and processed, and your digital mail is stripped and processed? Are you looking for a hybrid or a single digital or physical mail solution?
Second, you will need to look at the current market options and find a secure and future-proof company. A company like PF360 Capture can capture, transform, process, and manage your mail with ease. PF360 Capture uses an automated classification system that makes sorting with top-notch quality control a breeze.
Finally, you set up your mailbox and let automation provide you and your business line the best update since moving away from Windows 8. Your company can enjoy better tracking and control with a digital mailroom, a better user experience, better data security, and, most importantly, better data accessibility. Stop living in the 1990s and see how PF360 Capture can deliver an automated digital mailbox that will revolutionize how you and your company work with physical and digital mail.
