How does robotic process automation affect mail?

What is automated mail processing and how can it impact your business? If you are afraid of changes, in today’s entry we’ll show you that getting with the times does more good than harm! Although robots aren’t coming to your office anytime soon, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is already here. What is it and how does robotic process automation affect mail? Keep reading!

Table of contents:

What is mail robotic process automation?

Generally speaking, RPA is a way to use software robots to easily automate processes both within the same system and across multiple systems. Mail robotic process automation makes it possible to digitize physical mail. It automates a lot of clerical processes which drives down costs, while also increasing the speed of processing and the quality of outcomes.

Why is physical mail digitization important?

By now, the majority of your communications probably arrive digitally but, as recently as last year, there are still 25 billion pieces of B2B mail annually – the long tail of physical mail isn’t going to go away any time soon. Most of the remaining physical mail is also transactional which generally means that data needs to be extracted and merged with your existing digital databases and workflow systems.

Data extraction from physical documents isn’t a core function for any business. It’s a time consuming, labor intensive, expensive, and error prone process whose only purpose is to get the data you need to perform your value adding, core business processes. This is when physical mail digitization with the use of RPA comes in handy.

how does robotic process automation affect mail

What is the impact of robotic process automation on mail?

Digitizing the physical mail your company receives at the point of acceptance creates a prime opportunity for RPA. Physical mail is distributed to nearly every area of your business, but there are several processes that are common to the vast majority, if not all, of your mail.

The most common process is sorting and delivery which applies to every piece of mail. This requires reading the address and routing it to the right destination. In its simplest form, thanks to mail automation, RPA can OCR the envelope, look up recipients against a database and route the mail to the right person or group. RPA can also determine if the mail should be delivered to a transactional user interface, as an email attachment, or even discarded if it is standard class “junk” mail.

With automated mail processing, RPA can also be utilized to examine mail being distributed to specific destinations, automatically sub-categorize it based on known content types, extract information, and even structure the extracted data, so it can be integrated with existing processing systems.