Organizations large, medium, and small all have one thing in common—the need to process incoming mail and paperwork quickly and accurately. Mailrooms operate as a cost center in every business, yet they may be responsible for slowing down the intake and distribution of incoming mail. And when the volume of documents increases, so does the time, cost, and effort needed for processing them. As a new year begins, it might be a great time to leverage a business process outsourcing (BPO) partner to streamline and optimize the receipt and processing of your important documents.
With growth comes challenges. As businesses take on more clients, make bigger acquisitions, and add more employees, there is a converse result; the increased volume of documents, electronic and paper. Record-breaking expansion is great for a company but managing that rapid growth requires analyzing your internal processes to see where improvements can be implemented. Whether you run an entire organization or oversee mailroom operations, you’re constantly looking for ways to improve operations and the bottom-line.
There are several benefits in working with an outsourced digital mailroom partner. When looking at cost alone there are significant impacts from the reallocation of staff to more value-added work to the increased speed of processing digitized documents. Additionally, this wipes out the need for physical storage as your incoming documents are scanned upon receipt for secure digital storage in the cloud. This can lead to savings in real estate costs or allow you the flexibility to reassign space for expansion. Overall, the cost savings can be significant and sustainable.
One of the other major benefits when transforming your documents digitally with a BPO partner is the compliance aspect. For many industries, properly securing, maintaining, and tracking documents is critical to meet regulation guidelines. As importantly, being able to respond to correspondence and other documents in a timely manner is key to meeting compliance requirements. Organizations with an antiquated mailroom system can be the cause of penalties and fines throughout the organization.
A BPO Plan That Will Spark Growth
This is the time of year when growth is on the minds of those in the C-Suite along with many business owners. How do you grow revenue, improve customer service, and impact the bottom line? As most are still assessing the impact from 2019 – growth in 2020 can be easier than you thought. If you need to find new ways to affect growth think about upgrading how you manage your mailroom and incoming emails and the processing of those critical documents. Outsourcing those processes to a BPO digital document partner can provide a more cost-effective solution to an antiquated functional department.
Growth also requires an organization to balance an increased volume of work with limited resources. The same amount of people doing more work as a result. Imagine if you could free up some employees from traditional mailroom functions and have them help in more value-added areas. Replacing your mailroom with a digital document BPO partner like MetaSource means you can re-allocate those employees.
At the same time, not all companies are in the black. Some businesses are faced with leaner margins, reduction in clients, and uncertainty. To be fiducially responsible there may be some departments and functions that can be replaced with an outsourced partner. Mailrooms are a great place to start outsourcing to reduce costs and improve the efficiency of your organization. By choosing to make this department and process digital you can factor in immediate cost savings that could make a significant impact on your fiscal year.
Make Your Digital Transformation Complete
Innovative technology moves more rapidly than it did 10 years ago. Maintaining a competitive digital presence used to be accomplished with a quick code plug or updating a new operating version for backend software. Now, when a company undergoes a digital transformation it tends to be a digital overhaul from the ground up. But it does not have to take place all at once. Small, planned-out steps will result in a smoother transition and can start in the mailroom. With so many critical processes expedited with a digital mailroom, is your organization prepared to rethink the traditional way of receiving mail and email and getting those documents into process?
When you hear BPO and outsourcing, you typically think of call centers, customer service operations, or other core business units that can be outsourced at a lower cost. Not many business owners look at this model when it comes to the mailroom, but a digital mailroom is the first step in automating critical workflows. With workflow automation software, critical documents are routed, reviewed, and approved electronically and can be integrated with other software systems to enable data sharing in real time. By shifting to this type of BPO solution, your organization can increase accuracy while reducing processing time and operating costs. This also provides management broader insight and accountability for compliance.
Simplify Compliance with the Right BPO Services
Providing another company access to handle sensitive documents is not something that should be taken lightly. When dealing with personal information, financial filings, health records, personnel files, and other confidential documents, it is imperative that a BPO partner have policies and practices in place to ensure the secure handling of them.
One of the most important ways to ensure the confidential and secure handling of your documents is by working with a BPO partner with a SOC 2 Type 2 report. This is a third-party validation that processes are in place and procedures are followed on a consistent basis regarding the security and confidentiality of your data while in your partner’s facility.
Third-party reports and accreditations are critical in choosing a digital mailroom service provider. But the BPO service themselves can also help companies meet regulatory compliance requirements. Documents that must be reviewed and responded to within days, such as appeal and grievance correspondence in the insurance industry, can be processed in an aggressive turnaround time with an outsourced mailroom partner. Fines for being out of compliance are avoided, customers are happier, and staff is more productive.
Cost Savings with BPO
Traditional mail and paper documents can quickly become overwhelming. To stay on top requires a staff. The more to process the more people it takes to push it through. Over time this becomes an ordinary operating expense. When looking to impact revenue it doesn’t take long to see the benefits of digitizing a mailroom and paper documents. In today’s digital world a business should not have to rely on something that doesn’t keep pace. When most everything transfers digitally, having your important documents able to move with you is now more important than ever.
If cost savings across your organization is a priority in 2020 then look for ways to flatten hard expenditures. Reducing the volume of mail to process can cut the costs of that function by up to 75%—that can look good on an accounting sheet. Imagine now reducing cost while increasing efficiency? That is a sure way to maximize the potential of a struggling business function. MetaSource has been helping companies like yours find success like this with digital transformation for over 30 years.
