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Why should a digital mail solution fit your business needs?

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Why should a digital mail solution fit your business needs?

Custom inbound mails digitization seems like it should be simple – just scan it and you’re done, right? – but, as always, the devil is in the details. Mail reaches into every corner of your business, across departments with diverse tasks. And in the same way that there’s rarely a single workflow that works for every department, the same is true for digital mail. In working with a variety of corporations, we’ve found that digitizing inbound mail creates the most significant savings and efficiencies when it’s tailored to an organization’s unique needs – suiting the ways they already do business. In this blog, we’ll review these needs, and the solutions that could work best for you. Why should a digital mail system fit your business needs? Keep reading!

Table of contents:

Custom digital mail system for business – what to take into account?

Delivering digital mail as email

When we first start talking to executives who haven’t previously thought about a custom digital mail system for business, we often hear, “Why don’t we just send it through regular email?” This fits their personal experience, and email delivery is a convenient solution for mail sent to a single individual. But in today’s world, 70+% of physical corporate mail isn’t addressed to an individual. It’s transactional, not social, and is therefore addressed to a functional department, group, or PO Box. Sending conventional email to a transactional group is a recipe for catastrophe. It requires an extra copy of the content for each member of the group, which bogs down your network. Multiple people trying to manage a queue of transactional email is difficult. And it’s almost impossible to apply audit controls to conventional email queues, so it’s hard to insure nothing gets lost or overlooked.

Let the user decide

Some digital mail solutions for business initially send only envelope images to each user, and allow them to decide what action to take on each piece – receive the physical or scanned documents within, or toss the mail as junk. This might seem like a good idea, as in theory it looks like it saves scanning cost, sends the user the physical or digital version as requested, and keeps low/no-value content out of your network. But, the reality is this type of solution increases both labor and delivery time, and doesn’t scale well. Every piece of mail is touched at least twice. Users that don’t respond don’t get their mail, and clog up the mailroom with mail awaiting action. Additionally, this model doesn’t work for transactional mail, where 100% of the mail should be digitized and sent to a group destination to facilitate the fastest and most efficient transaction processing and customer response.

digital mail solutions for business

Machine learning/data extraction

When talking about mail digitization for business, it’s worth mentioning that machine learning solutions are the coolest technologically-wise. A piece of mail comes in and magically, the data is extracted and put into the right system. In the right circumstance, this is clearly optimal – the fastest time to get data into your systems with the least amount of labor. But for many types of mail, this automation is unfeasible. AI systems don’t (and simply can’t) come off-the-shelf with all the knowledge necessary to sort and process the full breadth of a corporation’s complex mail. These systems can perform well when gradually “trained” on large volumes of similar documents. But when presented with a corporation’s highly diverse content, the training process becomes unending. These factors make machine learning an unlikely core solution for eliminating physical mail. Mail still needs to be presorted, mail unsuitable for machine learning still needs to be physically delivered, and document training must be coordinated with many groups.

Flexible and complete

It should be getting clear by now that the issue with custom inbound mails digitization cannot be solved by a one-size-fits-all solution. This is where Eco-mail comes in. The right solution needs to be able to distribute 100% of your mail without presort. It has to be easy and quick to deploy to all corners of your company, so you can reap the benefits of digital mail today – not at some distant point in the future. It needs to have the flexibility to deliver individually addressed mail as attachments to their conventional email, or send transactional mail to sophisticated interfaces that are designed to support groups of users. It also needs to be the digital middleware that allows you to connect your digital mail to existing departmental workflows, or expose the “right” high-volume queues to machine learning solutions to efficiently extract and transform data.

Custom digital mail system for business – the takeaway

Knowing the answer to the question “why should a digital mail solution fit your business needs?” is the first step towards making an informed decision. A digital mailroom offered by Eco-Mail offers all the above-mentioned functionalities. It’s a real-world solution that allows you to digitize all of your mail, transform your operations, and capture the strategic and economic benefits today – not at some point far into the future.

Want to learn more about this technologically advanced solution? Check out our entry where we discuss the four key benefits of a digital mailroom.