Corporate mailroom management – with all its envelope opening, paper sorting, and mail distribution – can be taxing but is usually manageable. For the most part, even temporary upticks in mail volume can be deftly handled with a bit of extra effort on the part of your mailroom staff, and while that might cause some grumbling and temporarily low morale, the key word there is temporary.
On the other hand, seasonal and permanent increases in mail volume due to mergers, acquisitions, or growth, require more attention and could lead to a mailroom meltdown if not carefully managed.
Because problems that stem from the mailroom can quickly cause serious repercussions as they ripple throughout the rest of your organization, it’s important to find solutions that help you wrangle your mailroom mess.
Poor mailroom management strains your business
For example, if your business can’t process incoming orders or inquiries quickly enough, your clientele could grow dissatisfied with your slow customer service response times. Missed filing deadlines and lost or misfiled documents could breach compliance regulations and cost you in fines when audit time comes around. And paying invoices late or forgetting to pay them altogether can seriously strain relationships with vendors. New York City businesses know to stay ahead of the competition they need to provide best in class customer service, maintain strong vendor relationships, and minimize operating costs.
If you deal with these types of backlog issues seasonally or on an every day basis and don’t address them now, they’ll circle back around for the next quarter, season, or year. This could lead to poor productivity, poor efficiency, and ultimately the inability to keep up with your competition. Why bother with that? It’s time you fixed your mail problems with mailroom outsourcing.
How mailroom services fix business inefficiencies
Today we’re sharing the story of one New York City business that implemented mailroom outsourcing to fix its mailroom issues and started seeing efficiency wins almost immediately: Visiting Nurse Service of New York.
Visiting Nurse Service of NY
Visiting Nurse Service of NY (VNSNY) is a New York City home care agency and a health plan administrator that wanted to find a way to be more proactive when it came to mailroom management and responding to appeals and grievances from their 40,000 members.
One of the issues VNSNY was running into with a paper mail system was that processes were moving too slowly because of all the handling required, and paper documents were difficult to track as they moved among employees. Staff had become frustrated by the extra time they were spending to find misplaced documents and decipher handwritten notes.
A second issue was the rising cost of space and materials given their location in New York City. As any New Yorker knows, Manhattan has limited space and the space it does have is valued at a premium. With compliance mandates that call for each case’s documentation to be stored for eleven years, the company needed to find a more cost-effective way to document their cases – continuing to add file cabinets to store their ever-multiplying paper files was taking up far too much space.
The third area in which VNSNY struggled with inefficiency was their audit preparation process. The dates on the outsides of grievance and appeals envelopes were often illegible after being through the mail, forcing auditors to disregard them and move to the next case with a legible date. Despite the fact that their response times were excellent in reality, VNSNY was unable to prove it during audits due to the illegible receipt dates on these grievance and appeals communications.
In order to overcome these issues and move forward with more streamlined business processes, VNSNY sought help from MetaSource to implement a virtual mailroom and were able to significantly improve their efficiency, save money, enhance employee productivity and member services, and maintain a thorough level of audit preparedness at all times.
Dig out from all your paper with a digital mailroom
Corporate mailroom management can be tricky for New York City businesses of any size. Whether you’re dealing with thousands of customer inquiries a week, or your staff just isn’t equipped to handle the physical and electronic documents that you receive daily, mailroom outsourcing could be the solution you need to dig yourself out from under your backlog of paper clutter.
Let us help you avoid lapses in compliance, unpaid invoices, and the overall headache that comes along with dealing with physical and electronic mail. Make this the year your New York business steps into the world of digital mailroom management.
Is it time to develop a digital mailroom?
Check out our digital mailroom checklist to find out!
