Your physical mail gathers dust while digital mail gathers data.
Physical mail is the “wild west” of compliance and process controls in your business. In the past 30 years, the entirety of your organization’s work exists in the digital sphere: email, web, and digital files, all accessed electronically via easy user interfaces that let you sort, search, and share the data.
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Yet, physical mail still exists in many businesses. Now think about the physical mail coming into your business. Until someone opens and copies it, it can’t be shared. Unless someone digitizes it, it can’t be searched. If it’s delivered to the wrong physical mailing address, it can easily be lost. If the recipient is on vacation or leave, it may well sit gathering dust, placing key customer service KPIs at risk.
Horribly inefficient, right? It gets worse. Want to know who saw a document, what actions were taken regarding it, by whom and when – good luck, there are virtually no controls on physical mail. It’s an anachronism, a legacy process that’s slowly going away but has a “long tail” that’s expensive and, until now, difficult to eliminate.
Why choose digital mail services?
Digital mail is the answer. Scan all of your mail at the point of entry, and everything changes. With digital mail services, a physical paper that’s clumsy, isolated, and dumb suddenly becomes a smart digital asset that can be moved, managed, and tracked as easily as all your other digitized info.
In contrast to the wild west of physical mail, digital mail is driven by rules, rules, rules. Rules about where to send a document, who can see a document, and what they can do with it. Rules about what happens when it hasn’t been acted upon after a specific period of time. Rules that equal superior controls. And all these controls are only possible because digital mail is automatically gathering data instead of dust – building a complete audit trail of every action from the minute it hits the system. Coupled with advanced and patented encryption technology and your business enters the age of digital transformation.
Digital mail system and management
Virtual mail also helps you manage your business better. Those extensive, detailed audit trails are easily interpreted to generate metrics about your operations that you never had before. How many pieces of mail came in, which departments got more of it, how long it takes to process each piece (first day, second day, nth day), and how many people touch it along the way.
Bottom line, your controls just get better and better. And your transparency soars. Say you’ve got an audit for a compliance issue. With a digital mail system, you can simply tell it: “Show me all the documents sent to John Doe in the month of May 2021, who touched them when, and exactly what happened to them.” With digital mail, you get an answer in seconds. With physical mail…never.
Often, physical mail is so ingrained in your business that you rarely think about its drawbacks. But, put it in the context of the rest of your digitally enabled business, and its antiquated, expensive nature becomes glaringly obvious. A smart solution – one that gathers data instead of dust, from the first point of entry – can be a critical part of your business’s future.
Utilizing a digital mail system within your organization is a cornerstone of creating a digital transformation strategy that can outlast the uncertainties of the future. Let Eco-Mail be solutions consultants in your effort to bring greater efficiency, security, and control to your organization.
Also, read more about physical mail threats.
