A business owner's guide to digital mailrooms

A digital mailroom operates similarly to traditional mailrooms. It’s the primary intake point for external information that an organization receives. If a customer has to mail in a check to pay for a bill or a future business partner needs to send a physical copy of a signed contract, the mailroom is the department that receives these documents, sorts them, and then delivers them to the appropriate party.

Where a digital mailroom differs from traditional mailroom solutions is in how it processes that information. A traditional mailroom delivers physical mail by hand, while a digital mailroom converts as many documents as possible into digital files to improve information access and speed up delivery times.

Here’s how it works.

1. Sorting: First, mailroom employees sift through the day’s mail and weed out any junk mail, duplicates, and other information that doesn’t need to be scanned.
2. Scanning: Then, they’ll run approved mail through digital scanning hardware to convert the document into a digital image or file. During the scan, software like PaperStream Capture Pro processes these files to add structure that makes them easily searchable and usable.
3. Distribution: After a file has been properly scanned and indexed, it is routed to its final digital destination. That destination could be an employee’s email inbox, a folder within your network, or the cloud.

Read Digital Mailrooms Explained: What They Are and How They Work to learn more about this process.

Transitioning from a traditional mailroom to a digital one can be a massive undertaking for many organizations. Making that switch requires an investigation of current mail handling processes and a willingness to overhaul long-running routines to make them more efficient.

However, those that do tend to see significant savings on time, labor, and resource costs that they can reinvest into improving the rest of the business. Digital mailrooms do this by:

• Reducing physical mail handling: Hand delivery of physical mail is a time-consuming process. This is especially true if your organization is spread out across a large distance and internal mailroom clerks need to walk or drive mail to its destination. Physical mail can also be misdelivered or lost, leading to unnecessary delays as information gets rerouted to its destination. Digital mailrooms significantly reduce these pain points by streamlining the sorting and delivery processes. For many pieces of mail, all clerks need to do is open and scan it. The software will handle the organization and storage processes for you, with no manual intervention required.
• Cutting down on physical storage needs: Many organizations see hundreds — or even thousands — of pieces of mail every day. And even mail needs to be stored somewhere once it’s used. Digital mailrooms reduce the need to maintain file cabinets or other physical storage methods. Once scanned, mail can be shredded or archived as necessary.
• Enhancing security and regulatory compliance: Instead of spending money on physical locks, cameras, and security guards to keep physical archives safe, organizations can use automated user access and encryption tools to keep documents secured. Automated processes also ensure that security and privacy rules align with your organization's compliance requirements.

Law firms, healthcare providers, and remote-friendly organizations are all taking steps to digitize their mailrooms. Read Why Businesses Are Moving to Digital Mailrooms to learn more.

Several critical pieces of technology must work together to allow digital mailrooms to operate at peak efficiency. These include:

• Document scanners: High-powered document and image scanners do the bulk of the up-front digitization work. Many include trays capable of holding hundreds of pieces of paper and can scan dozens of documents in seconds. These can help mailrooms process large workloads in no time.
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR): OCR is a component built into many digital scanning and document processing platforms. It’s a powerful tool capable of converting an image of text into a format as interactive as a native digital document. You can take a scan of a patient intake form and add to it or copy information from it as if you’d typed it up on a computer yourself.
• Workflow automation: Even sorting digital files by hand can be time-consuming. Instead, rely on automation to sort them for you. You can set up relevant parameters ahead of time. Then, when you start scanning files, your scanning platform uses AI-powered tools to tag and sort those files with no additional work on your part.
• System integration: Organizations use a ton of software to get their work done. The most effective digital mailroom solutions can integrate with a wide variety of software and tools, synchronizing data and enabling fast, easy delivery of essential information.

Separately, this technology is impressive. Together, it works to make digital mail delivery seamless.

Here’s an example that puts it all together. An insurance agency’s mailroom regularly receives mail from clients to help agents process their claims — receipts, contracts, written statements, things like that. The mailroom takes these files when they come in and feeds them into their digital scanners to process them. OCR converts the text on these documents into editable content, which the automation platform reads. It sees the same last name pop up in all of the files, so it knows to tag each document with that account and sort it in the respective folder in the cloud. These files then appear within the insurance agent’s claims management platform, ready to use within moments.

Read The Technology Powering Digital Mailrooms to learn more about the systems that digital mailrooms rely on.

Every organization’s mailroom has unique processes that fit their specific needs and workflows. Replicating those with digital processes requires a deep understanding of how things currently work so you can create a plan that allows for a smooth transition. If you’re interested in making the leap to a digital mailroom, these steps will help you get started.

• Assess current processes. Take a look at how mail flows through your organization, from intake to sorting and delivery. Figure out where your mailroom experiences the most friction, whether that’s long delivery times or a lack of accountability over responsibility. Once you understand the whole picture, you can develop digital processes that account for all of your mail without replicating broken systems.
• Investigate available solutions. Once you know what you need from your digital mailroom processes, you can start looking into solutions that will help you meet your goals. Look for platforms with robust OCR and automation capabilities. If your industry requires specific security and compliance standards, ensure that your solutions are able to meet or exceed them.
• Train your staff. Develop standard operating procedures and train your employees to adhere to them to maintain consistency in mail processing. Make sure you bake security and compliance processes into your training as well so they remain a priority.
• Continuously improve processes. It’s good to revisit your mailroom processes every six to 12 months to take stock of what’s working and what could be improved. Adjust processes as necessary to boost mailroom efficiency and accuracy.

Read How to Transition From Traditional to Digital Mailroom Solutions for even more insight into how your organization can make the leap.