Paper Mail Costs More than You Think. What Are the Corporate Mail Costs?

The physical mail that flows into and throughout your enterprise is incredibly inefficient and drives substantial unnecessary costs. But why has it been so hard to rid this particular logjam from an otherwise digitally streamlined flow of commerce and how much does corporate mail cost? 

Table of contents:

• How much does paper mail cost your company?
• Digital mailroom as a solution to decreasing traditional mail costs
• The takeaway

How much does paper mail cost your company?

The vast majority of paper mail costs can be measured not just in dollars, but in labor inefficiencies, lack of controls (we’ll be writing on that next time), lost time, and slow customer responsiveness (there’ll be more on that, too) – occurs after the mailroom makes its initial delivery. Hidden in every corner of your business, ingrained in a thousand downstream operations, these pain points are so widely distributed among many departments that they can seem invisible – and hard to solve at their source. Often, they become a completely accepted component of the fabric of your business. Yet their total impact can be huge.

Example? At one big bank we work with, their “consumer correspondence” department receives several thousand pieces of mail a day. Every day, trained employees open, evaluate, sort, and repack each piece into 50+ bins for internal forwarding – to different departments, typically in distant locations – while still on paper.

This kind of “content-based post-delivery sub-sort” and inefficiency of paper mail occurs in almost every department. The labor alone is costly, but there’s more. This kind of mail is almost always transactional: it requires a response, and it can’t fall between the cracks. Often, it contains personal or confidential information that needs to be protected. So, add security and document control processes to the equation – and you can feel the time, labor, and management costs mounting.

Now, zoom into just one of those 50+ destinations — “account name changes.” Located in another city, it gets about 100 sub-sorted pieces of mail a day. There, an employee scans each document one by one — for security and control of the count. Then, that same employee forwards each scan by email – one by one, for the same control reasons – to a destination in India… And in India, they print them out again. Now, you should find it much easier to visualize corporate mail costs.

Why? Because a multi-person team works to enter name changes into a master system. And it’s impossible to have multiple users access the same email inbox and maintain the necessary control. So they print and stack each document in a physical pile, so each employee can grab the paper on top and do their data entry until the pile is gone. And this is in a so-called digital world!

The details may be different in every department, but the story is the same: the inefficiency of paper mail leads to great expenses and slow response time.

Digital mailroom as a solution to decreasing traditional mail costs

Digital mail changes everything. All of your mail is digitized on high-speed scanners at the point of entry, then routed instantly and automatically to either the end-recipient, or to subject-matter experts who forward it to its proper destination – with a click. And at every step, the system automatically builds a complete digital audit trail of every action taken – offering perfect, searchable control.

This means, in our India example, no more reprinting. Instead, the relevant name-change documents go into a multi-user digital queue for processing – while the system automatically keeps track of exactly which documents are processed, and when, and by whom.

Once you think about it, digital mail is amazingly powerful and helps to overcome the inefficiencies of paper mail. Processing times are compressed by orders of magnitude, while the labor and workflow steps associated with physical mail – opening, repacking, forwarding, downstream scanning, printing, and duplication – all goes away. It’s impossible to lose or misplace documents, and management transparency and metrics are at your fingertips.

The takeaway

The truth is, when it comes to costs, the average corporate mail costs are just the tip of a paper iceberg. The more you look beneath the surface, the more obvious it becomes that the potential benefits of bringing digital mail to your enterprise are enormous.