Is an Outsourced Mailroom the Answer?

The more your business grows, the easier it is to spot the tasks and processes that are wasting your time. Your ever-increasing business volume strains your staff, slow processes become even slower, and you start to realize how much room there is to automate or outsource tasks to increase your efficiency.

While every business has plenty of processes and departments that could benefit from automation, there’s one particular area where outsourcing can trickle down and have a bigger positive impact than you’d expect: your mailroom.

When you think of your current mailroom, what comes to mind? Clutter? Frustration? The fact that incoming mail is impossible to stay on top of? While all of these are common struggles for businesses who manage their mailrooms manually, they’re also easily solvable. To illustrate this, let’s walk through some specific mailroom pain points our clients Visiting Nurse Service of NY and CLEAResult were able to overcome by using our digital mailroom and document processing services.

It takes too long to process documents after receiving them

When it takes a long time to process documents received by mail, you’re not just wasting time, you’re wasting money, too. If processing delays cause you to pay invoices late, you’re looking at late fees. If invoices get lost in the shuffle of a disorganized system, you might accidentally not pay them and damage your vendor relationships. Slow processing times can also negatively impact your ability to provide top-notch customer service – that’s exactly the issue CLEAResult was facing:

CLEAResult is the most trusted leader in energy residential energy efficiency, conducting home energy assessments (HEA) for over 40,000 residents in Massachusetts. With their significant growth over recent years, CLEAResult started to realize that they needed a more efficient way to manage the large volume of documentation produced during each assessment. Each assessment produced over 30 documents that needed to be sent to headquarters for processing, a process that took upwards of seven days to complete.

Implementing outsourced mailroom services reduced the seven day turnaround to 3-5 days, allowing CLEAResult to process assessment documents 30% faster and serve more clients.

Managing paper documents is causing compliance problems

Dealing with paper documents opens your business up to a host of problems, from manual data entry errors to documents getting damaged and becoming unreadable. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch these problems early and just have to waste a little time fixing them. If not, you could be facing more serious issues like missed deadlines, missed payments, or even hefty noncompliance fines.

Visiting Nurse Service of NY (VNSNY) is a home care agency and a health plan administrator that was having issues with audits of their paper-based grievance and appeals documentation. The dates on the outsides of grievance and appeals envelopes were often illegible due to wear and tear from being mailed, forcing auditors to disregard illegible envelopes and move to the next file with a legible date. While VNSNY had excellent grievance and appeals response times, they didn’t have documented proof due to the illegible dates, which exposed them to noncompliance fines.

Now that VNSNY has a virutal mailroom, dealing with audits is no longer a hassle. As grievance and appeals forms come in by mail, they are opened, prepped, scanned and indexed, and electronically timestamped, eliminating the date legibility problem entirely and improving compliance.

The volume of incoming documents is too much to handle

As businesses grow, the volume of incoming mail inevitably grows too. While temporary increases in mail volume, like at the end of a quarter or year, can be dealt with by hiring temporary staff, it’s cost-prohibitive to do so when the volume increase is permanent and will only continue to rise. So if hiring additional mailroom staff isn’t the right solution, what’s the alternative? Hiring a document processing company with digital mailroom services.

CLEAResult was experiencing significant growth and processing over 35,000 new documents each week had become untenable. With digital mailroom services, CLEAResult experienced increased processing efficiency without having to hire any additional administrative staff. They are also able to provide significantly faster customer service, because the documents customer support agents need to access in order to answer customer inquiries are available instantly in their document management system.

You’re jumping through hoops to process documents received by email

Are you having trouble keeping up with the volume of incoming email or managing multiple inboxes? Are you printing out email attachments so you can file or process them? Are you manually entering data from the printed attachments into your ERP system on top of all this? Receiving and processing your emails shouldn’t be this complicated. This is where digital mailroom services come in.

With outsourced email management, invoices and other important documents that you receive as email attachments are sent to a single inbox monitored by MetaSource. The attachments are stripped from the email messages and converted into the appropriate file format to be processed, then their data is automatically captured. This raw data, along with a crisp digital image of each document, is then delivered to you for digital processing.

Take the next step to solve your problem

Are you ready to solve your processing problems by outsourcing your mailroom? The next step is finding a document management partner you can trust with your sensitive documents and data.