As the technological world continues to evolve at an unprecedented rate, digital mail has become a popular topic among businesses, corporations, and even individuals. The possibility for an enterprise to receive, process, and track every piece of physical mail that comes to them without having to touch a single envelope is very real and is happening all over the world. As complicated as it might sound, you might be surprised at how easy it can be done. If you are unfamiliar with the concept and want to know what it is all about, keep reading; we have answers.
The Digital Mailroom
A typical digital mailroom can be fashioned in a number of ways. The most popular is that all of the physical mail that would go to a business will be forwarded to another address where every piece of mail can be processed. Some companies will pick up all of the mail from the business and bring it to their processing place, others will not. In any event, the mail will be delivered to a secure, central hub where the digitization process can begin.
Mail will come in various categories from spam, to highly sensitive. Each piece of mail will be assorted and categorized properly. Mail with time-sensitive content will be made a priority, and ads from the local shoe store will not.
Every piece of mail will be opened and scanned, then routed to the person, or the department that it is intended for. As the mail is scanned, it is recorded and tracked from the moment it is scanned until it is put to rest wherever it goes. The process will track every person that sees the document, what they do with it, and who they send it to next. An enterprise digital mailroom will allow for workers to instantly reply to time-sensitive mail via email so that there will be practically no waiting time for a response.
The physical mail that is left over after the scanning process will either be securely shredded or stored per the instruction of the company. Everybody is happy.
The Digital Mail Software Platform
In order for digitized mail to be possible, there has to be a software program in the background that makes it all work. There are a plethora of applications out there that are available for businesses to transform their mail to digital mail. The most robust ones will allow for multiple users to log in from remote computers into a centralized place in order to work and receive mail. Once the physical mail is scanned into the system it gets stored in a digital cloud so that the people that have permission to access it can. The software can allow administrators to create users, groups, and facilitators of groups to conduct tasks and respond to mail as necessary.
Software platforms can be in the form of an off-site platform on a secure server as SaaS, also known as software as a service, or it can be behind a private firewall on a company server.
Going Digital
Just the fact that having a digitized mail solution can cut the spread of germs by touching the mail by 100% is a great reason to start the transformation process. Besides safety, security, response time, and money savings are hard to ignore if you do the math. The way things are going in this time of social distancing and business restrictions it would actually be harder to keep physical mail than it would be to transfer to digital mail. Do your research and check out the resources for digital transformation. You might quickly learn that it is in your best interest to make the switch.
