What is an intelligent Digital Mailroom?

What is a Digital Mailroom?

a) One application of an intelligent automation platform that allows you to create a strategy and journey towards delighting your customers, by becoming hyper-efficient, compliant, and in control of any channel of communication paper, email, web, and mobile app.

b) Outsourcing your post so you don’t have to deal with it yourself

c) A scanner and some OCR software

d) A new franking machine that has updated its analogue clock.

OK, you have had harder questions already today haven’t you? The problem is that many C Suite executives are not aware of what an intelligent automation platform can do for their business. All too often they have become jaded to IT projects that promise the earth, but just end up costing it.

The other problem I have is that I have been delivering Digital Mailrooms for over a decade, and my customers often still insist on calling them an OCR project. Ironically, it is the reduction of paper and the rapid increase in email that is starting to help clarify the understanding. We had one customer that 5 years ago would scan tens of thousands of documents a week, and had a few thousand emails - and now process tens of thousands of emails and only a few thousand images of paper scanned from the mailroom.

Benefits of a Digital Mailroom

Rather than have customers submit documents to different processes depending upon whether they mailed the document, emailed it, or uploaded it to the website, you can unify onto a single solution. Then you can tell instantly;

• How many inbound communications you had today, what was their source (e-mail, web upload, or paper that was scanned and how long each step took, and how many keystrokes).

• Exactly how much time and effort did it take to ingest the data from those documents into all the workflows and systems.
• How many of those documents were in good order and how many of them lacked vital pieces of information that you needed to process them effectively
• How many documents came in from any source that are so urgent that without immediate attention you might face litigation, losing a customer or upsetting a trading relationship

How much do your colleagues and your customers enjoy how long it takes to process information into your organisation?
Can this process be automated and run at any time of day or night? With a digital mailroom, it can.

The following diagram shows a subset of what is in an intelligent automation platform and focuses the technology to meeting the digital mailroom challenges.

However, at its heart, a Digital Mailroom is a strategy and a journey.

Certainly, you can increase customer satisfaction by being more responsive, but you can set SLAs and monitor and improve them over time. You can find out what is important to the customer and drive the focus of your solution to deliver those results.

Equally, removing the drone work and drudgery will bring about an increase in Staff satisfaction. But again this is an ever-moving target where you work with your team and look for ever-increasing automation to help remove the boring aspects of the job and through deep analytics allow people to focus on the areas that need the improvement the most.

The main reason you move towards implementing a Digital Mailroom is to drive operational efficiency, and this is easily monitored with the right solutions and most importantly allows you to scale your operations to demand and focus renewed effort to deliver increasing results.

The irony is that with an Increase in speed, you also get an increase in accuracy and control, and because it allows you to create a standard operating procedure across all your communication channels in every geography, it also bakes in compliance as your processes are now automated and monitored throughout.

A digital mailroom allows you to become agile in the face of change

Many will have read my continuing theme of Darwinian evolution applied to business theory and only if You are Agile and flexible can you cope with major event like COVID-19 or take advantage of new and evolving market conditions to allow your business to flourish.

In conclusion a Digital Mailroom is the perfect marriage of human and technology, a perfect marriage of IT and Operations which brings with it a perfect marriage of customers’ expectations and your processes.

Want to know more?

Twofold Ltd assists businesses to overcome these challenges with our range of mailroom and data solutions. From mailroom equipment, scanning and capture, to document management and full digital transformation, contact us via the form here, or give the team a call on 0118 951 9800.

Tim Miller

Digital mailroom Specialist