Consumer prices continue to surge as inflation accelerates at its fastest pace since 1982. Driven primarily by supply chain issues, labor shortages, and high food costs, it’s likely that households that make less than $40,000 a year will experience severe financial hardship. According to a recent Gallup survey, 45% of U.S. households have already begun feeling the weight of inflation. Of those surveyed, 10% describe hardship as threatening their current standard of living.
And the hardships don’t end with consumers. Rising prices will likely lead to lower consumer spending as well as higher input costs, squeezing profit margins and reducing sales for businesses.
With supply constraints and higher wages caused by shortages, companies are being forced to think outside the box to cut expenses and address inflation. Forward-thinking companies are quickly adopting new technology solutions and partnering with business process outsourcing (BPO) companies to boost productivity, operate more cost-effectively, and, ultimately, successfully navigate inflation.
Could outsourcing and digitization be the solution to rising costs?
New technology and BPO services help companies reduce costs across their entire organizations. These solutions also help combat the current labor shortages by reducing manual tasks, so your employees can do more in less time. Here are a few solutions that you can prioritize to help your business weather inflation:
Digital Mailroom Outsourcing
USPS has announced that mail delivery will now take closer to five days to arrive, instead of two or three days. Even so, your customers will expect you to respond in the same amount of time. Thus, you’ll need to open, sort, distribute, and react to incoming correspondence faster and more efficiently than ever before. With staff shortages and the growing need to cut costs, this can seem like an impossible task.
Fortunately, a digital mailroom solution turns the impossible into the possible. A virtual mailroom enables you and your team to access incoming correspondence from anywhere, ensuring that documents that enter your organization are processed quicker and more efficiently. Not only will you be processing your mail notably faster, but you will also reduce errors and labor costs, and avoid late fees.
Additionally, you can boost productivity by enabling your employees to focus on core tasks instead of the time-consuming manual work that is required to manage a paper-based mailroom. Implementing a digital mailroom is an investment in efficiency as well as document security, reducing the chance of fraud, and ensuring compliance. Such a solution can help you decrease costs and overcome inflation today while also setting you up for success tomorrow.
Workflow Automation
Leveraging technology and automation can help you save on labor costs as well. This is why an increasing number of businesses are implementing workflow automation. Paying workers to carry out manual tasks is expensive and unnecessary. Automation can give employees back the time they need to complete more valuable functions.
In the coming years, workflow automation is going to be the solution that can make or break a company. Workflow automation is a method of expediting and streamlining document-based business processes to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and provide transparency. With the help of workflow automation, organizations can easily identify bottlenecks in processes and respond to them rapidly. When it’s easier to pinpoint issues, address them, and implement a solution, organizations experience increased efficiency and, ultimately, reduce costs.
AP Automation
In the past, you may have needed a large team to manually process invoices. Today, you can let technology do it for you and enable your accounting team to focus on other, more complex core tasks. In fact, 62% of invoice processing time consists of data entry, validation, GL coding, and approval. Accounts payable automation can reduce this lag time by up to 90%. This means your team can do more in less time, saving your company money, while also significantly reducing human errors.
How to get started with digital transformation solutions today
As prices continue to rise, making sure you aren’t incurring any unnecessary costs is necessary to reduce the impact on your profit margins. And taking the next step in your digital transformation journey is the key to doing so. From streamlining your mailroom to accurately and swiftly processing invoices, workflow automation software and BPO services are practical solutions for modern companies who need to combat rising costs.
With over 30 years of experience, MetaSource is a global leader in digital transformation, bringing the right mix of technology, expertise, and services that will help you achieve your business goals. As a SOC 2 Type 2 certified and HIPAA compliant company, our processes are audited annually by a third party, ensuring service quality and document security.
Contact MetaSource to find out how to easily undergo a digital transformation and offset the burdens of inflation. You can also download our mailroom outsourcing whitepaper to learn more about how a digital mailroom can help you save a significant amount of time and money.