Your mailroom is the source of a surprising amount of slow-downs, added costs, and barriers for teamwork. However, all of these pains can be easily rectified by switching to a digital mailroom.

Here are 5 ways that digital mailroom solutions benefit you:

1. Saving the Environment

There’s no denying that the health of our planet is on the mind of many businesses and consumers today. Many feel it our responsibility to ensure the world’s ecosystems are preserved and are pushing businesses to adopt practices that have a smaller carbon footprint.

This drive to protect our environment can be felt across all industries both B2B and B2C, and it’s no longer a “nice to have” aspect of your business but a factor that plays into purchasing decisions. Customers can, and will, choose a competitor’s product if they feel it’s the better choice for the environment.

This is doesn’t begin to cover any industry regulations that may require you to implement more eco-friendly practices.

Implementing a digital mailroom is one of the few ways your business will become environmentally friendly, without major costs or any lost time regarding your team’s efficiency. It’s often the best place to start for creating a paperless environment as it’s likely your company’s main source of incoming paper.

2. Reduced Operational Costs

Paper is expensive to purchase, store, and manage. You likely have a clerk or several clerks dedicated to managing the physical incoming and outgoing mail. This manual process costs you time and energy, and that’s not all.

Once they’ve organized and processed all documents, they need to be stored and distributed on-premise or offsite at another secure, and expensive, location. Internally, this creates additional equipment costs, takes up valuable square footage in your office, and is terribly inefficient. Offsite document storage and retention is very expensive and highly inefficient when you need critical information now.

Think of all the times an important paper is lost requiring your employees to take time out of their regularly assigned tasks to find it.

This means it is pricey in multiple regards, all of which can be removed by implementing a digital mailroom. In a digital mailroom your files will be immediately searchable, making the process of finding a document much easier. The mail can be processed automatically with OCR software, which means that you no longer require an overstaffed team of clerks so they can be put on other revenue-generating activities instead.

3. Improved Customer Service

You’ve likely already guessed the above benefits, so why not discuss one you likely didn’t realize: improved customer service.

Traditional mailrooms take time to process incoming information, which is a problem for customers who need to get serviced as soon as possible. With a digital mailroom, incoming information will be automatically sorted by:

  • Level of importance
  • Subject matter
  • Who’s best able to respond

This automatic sorting will help your support team move faster and offer better responses than before, not only making happier customers, but saving you even more money in the process.

4. Compliance

As compliance and regulations become increasingly important, more industries are requiring paperless offices. Companies are insisting on processes and procedures for document management practices to improve security and privacy at nearly every touch point for sensitive customer and company data. A digital mailroom solution will help to ensure that your business is conforming to the regulations set within its industry, as well as help with audits.

Most people only invest when it’s too late. Being proactive will save you from a massive headaches and extraordinary fines down the road, so it’s not a benefit to take lightly.

5. More Interdepartmental Cooperation

Another surprising benefit of implementing a digital mailroom is the ability to increase your team’s cooperation. Information held on physical paper documents present many issues for sharing with others as they could get lost or damaged, are hard to keep track of, and may be cumbersome to give to another team or staff member or keep from prying eyes.

Digital mailrooms have the ability to overcome all of those issues making communication and cooperation between teams at your company far easier. Thanks to the power of the PDF file, internal departments can avoid pitfalls commonly associated with digital documents like formatting errors and security.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are several powerful benefits of utilizing digital mailroom solutions. However, these benefits aren’t just achieved with just any solution or random technologies. They require a partner who can create an efficient and easy to use digital mailroom. Otherwise, you run the risk of experiencing few benefits from the change other than industry compliance, and even then, an improperly setup solution could be non-compliant as well!

About the Author

Derek Gerber, Director of Marketing, represents ActivePDF’s .NET PDF APIs and digital transformation solutions on-site and in the cloud.