Working from home may have set many of your employees free, but it’s left your managers with the headache of handling mail and other back-office operations for a mobile, dispersed workforce. Here’s how transitioning to an intelligent digital mailroom for remote workers can help make a long-term hybrid or work-from-home strategy and sustainable for your business.
The Paper Trap: How a Digital Mailroom Can Help Make Remote Work Better
While email, Slack, video conferencing, and online productivity management software have allowed many companies to turn work-from-home arrangements initiated by the pandemic into long-term hybrid or remote work strategies, many core back office functions—like mail sorting or payment processing—have yet to leave the building.
This can pose serious workflow challenges, especially as paper correspondence, including physical mail and faxes, remain central in much of the economy. Many organizations, from law firms to property management companies to government departments, still need to receive, sort, route, and process hundreds of pieces of physical mail per day.
And, while electronic fund transfer methods like ACH, Venmo and Zelle are becoming more popular, payments by check are still used by many. A recent survey found that the average U.S. financial professional is responsible for processing between 500 to 1,000 payments per month, with paper checks remaining the preferred payment method for over a third of business-to-business transactions.
This is because check payments remain easy to track, trace, and reconcile but the expense of maintaining an on-site presence simply to receive, process, and store incoming mail means your paper payments are costing you more in labor costs and overheads every year.
Outsourced digital mailroom services, including lockbox check depositing, offer a reliable and affordable way for many businesses to escape this paper trap. Here’s how it can work for your company.
What Is a Digital Mailroom?
A digital mailroom service automates your incoming mail-handling processes using a range of document scanning and capture processes. Inbound mail is provided as an individually tagged electronic document that can be easily tracked, shared, and stored.
Today, dedicated mailroom automation specialists offer companies fully customized outsourced solutions, including:
- A dedicated PO address for mail
- Inbound fax and email processing
- Digitization of incoming mail
- Storage and routing of digitized documents
- Shredding of mail once completed
Mailroom automation services also require payment processing and the ability to handle and secure sensitive data. An established digital mailroom outsourcing partner like ILM Corporation can offer:
- Lockbox payment processing services
- HIPAA compliance, ISO 9001:2015 Quality Management certified processes, and SOC 1 Type 2 secure systems
Out of the Office
The remote work revolution presents special challenges for companies that are continuing to manage their mailroom operations in-house. With many employees simply no longer on site, it takes longer for critical mail to reach the right person. That means payment processing or addressing other critical issues such as home owner association violations are delayed or essential services take longer to deliver.
Meanwhile, your remaining administrative staff are left with:
- Additional sorting and cataloging work
- New scanning and digitizing tasks
- Managing a rapidly growing electronic document archive.
The result is an increase in time-consuming work when qualified, experienced administration staff are becoming increasingly hard to find and retain. At the same time, it is becoming increasingly expensive for you to maintain office space and pay overheads just to store records and house a small on-site administrative staff.
Digital Mailrooms for Remote Teams
As more and more companies negotiate the transition to hybrid or full-time work-from-home operations, companies must rethink their office workflows, including mail and document handling.
By creating a single automated system for receiving, sorting, digitizing, and distributing mail, you can make sure:
- The right person receives critical communications
- Documents are properly handled and safely stored
- Payments are quickly and securely processed
More fundamentally, a full-service mailroom automation partner can help you put in place a centralized, secure document management system that your company needs to negotiate the remote working future. You’ll benefit from a single unified system for handling and storing all your digitized records using the same storage protocols and access controls.
Your remote teams—and your bottom line—will benefit from real efficiencies, including:
- Streamlined off-site storage
- Faster response and payment processing times
- Lower administration and personnel costs
- Improved productivity for your valuable existing staff
How to Outsource Your Digital Mailroom Services
You can begin your journey to a better mail-handling system for your remote teams by talking to a reputable digital mailroom partner like ILM Corporation. ILM will help you develop a digital mailroom solution that meets your specific business needs.
Specifically, our experts will work with your team to:
- Define which mailroom functions will be outsourced and what departments will be affected, while establishing a timeline, project milestones, and key performance metrics.
- Understand how your existing mail-handling process works and design a system to manage change and minimize disruption while meeting or exceeding your existing security standards.
- Implement your new digital mailroom, usually through a limited “soft launch” model that allows us to integrate learnings and feedback to refine operations as we scale up our processes.
- Build sustainable change by tracking progress and measuring efficiencies, and by putting in place robust protocols and procedures that allow our digital mailbox services to grow with you and meet your changing needs.
Set Your Remote Teams Free With a Digital Mailroom
Unlock the potential of your remote workforce by giving them the mailbox tools you need while keeping your core payment processing and record-keeping functions safe, secure, and efficient.
A flexible, tailored digital mailroom service from ILM Corporation will help you build the workflows and document handling capabilities you need to manage the flexible, dispersed workforces of the future while reducing your on-site storage needs, office overheads, and administrative costs.
Most importantly, we’ll free up your best people—wherever they are—so they can spend more of their valuable time doing what your company does best.
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